Energize. Each cell of your body as it alters the sensuous rhythm of sun-flakes, dust-motes illumined between blinds, to laugh the body electric until the sun goes out and the black limo lands, carrying six humans to mark a crossing, carry who you’d thought you were, into an Earth who knows. Solar System, Galactic Quadrant, Milky Way, the primordial Big Bang expanding inside you all along. Now that your brain has stopped permanently, the real you opens into its vasty depths.
Spiral galaxies have arms, but not like yours. Yet you love them as you once loved the failing fairy-tale cogs of hemoglobin coursing through your own heart. Shock of recognition beyond household duality, déjà vu of dissolve, of merciful annihilation, of love. All that dirty water rushing down the sink’s drain. The tinge, the sting of having no eyes to weep. No one to be.
The fizz of nanobots freeing peptides, first inklings of reassembly. Focus of new eyes on a softly vignetted oval face, and at first you think it must be your mother. “I’m Shirley, your Starfleet Orientation Mentor,” she says, in a voice that feels like home. “You’re almost back. You’ll recognize us shortly. Congratulations. How was your first trip across the transporter beam?”
But you were beyond all this. You sputter, then blurt, rubbery lipped, “Oh Mommy, you’re so… beautiful.” Sensation of melting. She smiles, tilts her head, holds her arms out to you, begins to fade.
—Bobby Parrott was obviously placed on this planet in error. In his own words, “The intentions of trees are a form of loneliness we climb like a ladder.” His poems appear or are forthcoming in Spoon River, RHINO Poetry, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Atticus Review, The Hopper, Rabid Oak, Exacting Clam, Neologism, and elsewhere. He currently finds himself immersed in a forest-spun jacket of toy dirigibles, dreaming himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule known as Fort Collins, Colorado where he lives with his partner Lucien, their house plant Zebrina, and his wind-up robot Nordstrom.
Warp 10 