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.
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.