WEBVTT

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This poem is called A
Science Fiction, mostly

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because someone once
told me, oh, poets

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can't write science fiction.

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And I said, yes, we can.

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A Science Fiction
for Ursula K. LeGuin.

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When the sun rose, it was
smaller than in my dream.

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I had been asleep for
what felt a long time

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and woke confused
and claustrophobic.

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The texture of sky
still magnetized me.

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A desert bright
day, but the light

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is streaked like too
much everything pulled

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to the edges of a
window in storm.

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What little of me
exists as aperture.

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I wanted so little
for my birthday.

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A moment's peace on a hill.

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And where did that get me?

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Into the stars themselves?

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To hitch myself to a salvage
run, 13 years round trip?

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A distress signal, a freighter
the company had written off

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the summer I learned
to kiss a girl

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until she shook with desire,
when the engines fired

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no one thought to
think, could even

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know this uncharted singularity.

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At night on Earth,
I am all of Orion.

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At night on Earth,
I fell tangential

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into a puddle of cold rain and
rippled the muddy reflection

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of new Chicago--

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blurred its confusion
into circuit and solder.

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This is what I can expect.

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Gravity, density,
volume dissipating.

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I am all at once.

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I studied all night for
an exam I wouldn't pass,

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slept through a snowfall that
piled itself upon itself.

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Death isn't the door you would
expect, isn't a carriage kindly

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stopping.

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I celebrated my birthday
on a science rig

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surveying a binary system.

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The galley scrounged
up cake and candle.

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I wished myself
into consciousness.

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Proximity alarms
should be blaring,

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but sound is stretched
to color, color

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stitched to light,
light solidifying

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to absence, absent the sequence.

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So that poem plays with the
idea of what it might be.

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Stephen Hawking's
theorized about it,

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so we're all over there,
Neil deGrasse Tyson

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about what might happen if a
human being wherever pulled

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into a black hole,
so I play around

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with their ideas in that piece.

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