FreezeRay:  Poetry With A Pop
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I CAN’T REMEMBER WHICH EXPLOSION SCENE

in the Star Trek 2009 reboot movie we  first
had sex to, but i remember your mouth looked   like
a black hole and when we kissed my organs mutated against  
each others’ soft and my brain dripped behind my eyeballs and    
i don’t remember how old i was when i first learned about    
black holes but the picture-book told me they turned a person
spaghetti-shaped right before their brains stopped working and
maybe that’s why the only thing i can cook well enough to   make
for other people is pasta / because i don’t want you to forget me   /

and maybe i’ll never write another poem that’s just a list of things  
we did together because i let the memories run loose like scared red-
shirts around my brain and when they try to stop the ship from
collapsing they all get swallowed up by something   dark

is it crazy or brave to accept a five-year mission to the end of the
known? we’re still not sure / maybe it’s based on   whether
you make it home or not / so at what point is it brave to stop
trying to turn around? i’ve roiled this relation-ship of ours   in

the craters of the universe for so long it might just be safer to
accept that i don’t know where this ends. your new partner
likes Star Trek too. i went to see the 2016 movie with my
parents and cried at all the mouth-holes like my mush-brain
was trying to remember what it felt like to inch   towards
the end of space and have the edge of space inch   back.

the first time Gaila was ever in the Original Series,
the video-editors thought her skin wasn’t supposed to
be green, so they kept editing her back normal   without
mentioning it to the directors. the directors thought their
body-paint wasn’t showing up on camera, so kept painting
Gaila’s actress darker greens until finally someone  
thought to ask why it wasn’t appearing in the   proofs.

you thought i didn’t want to have sex anymore
because the explosions stopped happening /
wanted to edit me back to my old brain, who
remembered how to swallow. it was  brave
of me to fuck until it was brave of me to stop.  
the video-editors were just doing their job,  saw
 
something abnormal and washed it  out
of their eyesight. how should they have known
they were removing the hardest parts of production,
what we spent so long trying to make work?

//

SPOCK PRAYS TO HIS HUMAN MOTHER’S GOD

and on the first day of Vacation Bible Camp,
some snot-nosed second grader  said,

what’s up with your ears?, and lo,
did logic tremble against  such

disregard for manners
and Spock does not remember his  answer,

nor does it matter, but this was the first time
Amanda had seen her son cry

and this is how Spock learned of God, as
distant as his father’s  home-world,

but powerful enough to make Amanda consider
relocating to the aforementioned  planet

thus quickly squelching any possibility
of a second day at Vacation Bible  Camp

and on the last day of Spock’s first  year
of the Vulcan equivalent of intermediate school

Sarek startled his son by telling him he was proud
of the work he had accomplished over  the

previous months and this was the first time
Spock had seen his mother  cry

and when Sarek swept out of the Vulcan equivalent
of a Terran kitchen, Amanda whispered in

Spock’s general direction, I prayed he would
be honest with you
, and Spock had never  heard

the word “pray” used in this context, so he
immediately went to his P.A.D.D. to research it

and lo, did not Spock confuse the spelling  of
that word with the word “prey” and picture Amanda

gouging a hole in the neck of some blurry beast
with delicately-gloved hands, and did not  Spock

immediately reject that image in search of
the truth, but o shit, did Spock still not

understand? how each prayer chips  away
at the response-capacity of an all-understanding

Thing? how each small death, when not achieved,
upsets the psyche of the emotionally  frail

Human? and so Spock asked Amanda, essentially,
what the heck? and Amanda responded by telling

the story of Noah’s Ark, in which God is both
the idea of shelter and the flood  which

necessitates it, and Spock feels an amount of shame  
in sympathizing with a killer, how Spock himself

must toil in the tightrope-finagling of his half-Human
emotions, how routine it is to slaughter  any

ungrateful joy lest it ruin the structure’s interior,
and this is how Amanda’s God and Spock’s  God

stay locked in a game of 3D chess, pawns  piled
so high they rattle the table with each meager shift

and o, how Spock wished for a God that did not
destroy everything worth experiencing, how   this

logically explains why Amanda’s God’s  name
was synonymous with a curse, lest   mispronunciation
 
inspire another drought so heavy it sticks
Amanda’s gospel to her teeth this many  years

after its conception, and when Spock asked
his mother why she still hunted at such  a

welling, why she chose the tradition of
bruised  knees,  Amanda responded,

if you cannot talk to God as anything
else, talk to God as a friend
, and  Spock,

who stopped himself from looking  up
the definition of “friend,” for fear he  would

not recognize the answer, accepted this
​as an option.


L. R. Bird is a cryptid from the Jersey Shore and a criminal with a history degree. They are the author of multiple chapbooks including BLOODMUCK and INVENTION OF THE MOUTH. They want to hear about your favorite bridge and they exist on the internet at birdpoet.github.io.
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