#pome

Met on a train- we were strangers then

Now Iv got a tan - I don’t want to be strangers again.

I thought you were the one - it faded away.

Butterfly’s are dead - please don’t be strangers again.

I hope the pain fades away like the dust off a train.

Please don’t become a stranger again.

Ooof. I was gonna marry them, not anymore, I gotta cancel the sword.

my body, a collection

of vials, vases, glass organs held together

by a deep loam. Pathways

in are brittle, or fluid, movement

like gravity itself pulled apart

from its meat-center. Don’t ask

about my heart; it has no color

or brightness, cut and entombed

into cling-close shadows, a pall -

white as church-bone - covers.

My heart rests inside my heart,

and my lungs in my lungs, ribs

a border fence, a wall

my skin, to keep out and keep in.

I make windows - curtains whip open

in my breath, a five-pointed star

in red and blue, to catch light

like prisms’ blooms from what are called

wounds. I don’t need this body

that rests in my heart, lungs, vials

and vases corked by the hot-and-damp -

shatter these tepid trinkets of me

against the dry, packed earth, gather

the self-shards with self-skin scarred

with the sand it sought to press

away, itself inside itself, like organs

sapped. Let out and let in

the moat, the wind, there is

no border wall now between me

the astronauts of Artemis II

lost contact with the Earth.

They had been away from Home before, but the silence

and darkness of that near-hour

was new. They had eachother -

what did they share in that short time?

A meal maybe - conversation assuredly.

Did they console themselves

that the world had not truly disappeared

behind its only satellite? Satellites

also, they drifted - were they uncertain?

Fearful? Did they hope, silently, that

the planet holding its breath for them

would reemerge different - new?

That on the other side of the Moon,

an Earth waited unmarked

by war, famine, cancer?

Did they hope to reestablish

connection with a world which -

in 40 minutes -

had - simply - fixed itself? Fixed

its heart? They went farther than

any living Earthling had yet gone - darker,

colder, and quieter. No contact.

In those 40 minutes they took photos

of craters and mountains never seen.

To return to an Earth broken -

as it has always been -

would hardly seem a celebration. To make contact

again, however, with the home and hardships

they knew, was nevertheless a relief -

a world broken by human hands, held together

by human hands. All we can do