Poems New

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Lying still in space is one thing, but to do so

so as to let your crewmate’s arm swing up,

up and down with any decent force

forces a body to get creative –

creative as the teams who built this can.

Can we still be heard at ground control?

Controlling the scope and strike is one thing.

Thing is, when the leather bites my behind,

behind the monitors, they might worry.

Worry the shrieks mean you’re space-bats, killing me –

me, the navigator (as if you’d be so,

so stupid as to strand yourself) – or that

that glance we shared as we buckled in

in Houston had become a full-on yes,

yes, mission-tanking marathon of banging.

Banging my head on the bunk as I buck,

buck beneath the swish and crack, I feel the thick red –

reddening with every whack – stripes rising,

rising like moons on the moons of my cheeks.

Cheeks ablaze, you break for air and peer,

peer sagely into the scanner. We are passing it now.

Now it is passing us – this ring of methane, ammonia, water.

Water? No, thank you. Onward, past what?

What might be described as a glorious,

glorious galactic fart. You take a few pictures for work,

work the buckle tooth this way and that.

That’s a big deal, I guess. That’s the reason we’re here.

Here, I mumble from my prison pillow. I think they might be fading. 

Fading? Kuiper, the volatiles? My butt-marks, I correct you.

Correct, you growl and grin. Get back in position.

Poem

translated from the Portuguese by the author

A glass paperweight with a hippocampus inside.

Why were our old gods replaced?

See how these two sentences are related?

How everything resembles a carousel turned into ashes?

Beeeeeep — your heartbeat just died for you, 

since you couldn’t do it for him.

Vendredi, peut-être – you said to yourself,

while you postponed the inevitable
  around Aesop or La Fontaine.

All this is a zoo, that’s for sure,

but why the hell couldn’t we, like before,

dance around the moon’s reflection

in a salt lagoon?

So many questions – doubts, at least, to hold on to.

Or are they just balloons from the Feast of St John,

rising up in the air to get rid of the nausea of heartburn?

Far away – inside the labyrinth? – a barrel organ
  plays a love song

(although it may be a military march dimmed by time

and distance…)

And, all of a sudden, a firecracker blows midway into the sky

and the hippocampus comes out of the redeemed rain.

God, or a little god, lands on the back of the hand that writes

and curls up between the hairs like a solid wine.

The poet sobs

(poets sob)

— an audience of elderly ladies give a standing ovation,

a semiologist, in a corner, feels lost between images

and meanings,

leaves the room

and time returns to its normal pace,

a floor of vinegar on its way to a greasy pole. 

You can never go home, not in the new executive world,

Civic waving at screens waiting for acknowledgement,

his entire form just a shadow in a world of lumens,

who decided he was cast from his nest? What cuckoo king came?

What sooted raven’s wing was flung before his birth,

some people just want to give, others need space to think,

and for Civic it’s the head’s padded cell, with no leaks above,

enough to flex the hare’s ear of verse, poetry’s thump,

rough ghosts spinning discs where a heart should be,

empty people casting nets & hauling up conundrums,

only the few dredge for ethics, kindness spun on a line,

a silver thing that hooks the bowed pin cushion of a jaw,

then is nothing, flawed reflections in a funny house

where spit & ambition is the everyday squalor of business,

whole weeks spent navigating a risk assessment on how to live,

the probability & severity of each attempt to become human,

requesting access to the back of house in public spaces,

green rooms sequestered for VIPs, communes requisitioned by MEPs,

organ donors questioned as smugglers, a world that shakes

for capacity & signage, where there is no middle ground, only edges,

a civilisation of throughways with no interaction, pinch-points 

of hesitation, where touch is sacrificed for the blade of a gesture,

relationships ended by app, redundancies enforced by live screen,

personal possessions dumped into loading bays, a white noise

that is ever constant, building to a drone, deafening with bass,

a world where two friends would never walk the same path –

for risk of love’s entirety being washed from the earth.