life on mars, or a backup escape plan

every national park, even the one in ohio / you're telling me ohio has a national park? the last time i was there i only found crumbling barns / the holes in the roof matched the gaping tear under my ribs / and it suddenly made perfect sense why the brothers who found the first way off this earth were from dayton / the parents i never met of the grandmother i lost are from nova scotia and although this connection is spider silk i must go / maybe the drake passage could teach me that nothing i've feared before matters / that nothing matters in the face of that wave / that i am not nearly fearful enough / right now i fear i will die with an island-shaped piece missing from me if i do not make it to ireland / alaska beckons from my hometown harbor / there are still fjords left to drown in there / most of these places are cold / dead of all summers and body heat / i want somewhere i'm the only thing with what could be called a heart on a good day / your arms / those were warm once / i think i should start small / try opening my blinds to the bitter morning again / how am i supposed to make it to the ends of the earth if i can't even leave my room

it's a terrible fate, you know? when i met that man
who'd seen the stars from barely any closer than me
but far brighter than i could dare imagine, he said
he didn't see anyone for a whole day after he landed.
your body rejects the planet you were born on, he explains—
meeting someone's eyes is too intimate an act not to blink through
and gravity has an ache you don't remember from before.
he claims he'd go back for a fourth time. i'm not sure i believe him:
his lips curve like a man who's forgotten how to smile at earthlings,
a man who couldn't trick himself into thinking he was flying,
a man who never came back. there are many of those,
but most of them are mourned. everything up there is meant to fall,
cursed to miss the earth on every orbit. don't let that be me.
don't let me go where i learn to make an alien of the home
i'll have to relive myself leaving every time i tumble from the sky.

you told me the end of the world will be kind.
i don't know why you lied; i don't know why i chose
to believe this disintegration would be a gentle act.
maybe this was only the universe's final resort,
a reluctant undertaking of entropy and destruction
as it apologizes for the need to erase us from its fabric.
i understand the desperation: if i can't beg for tenderness
then i'm ready to bite for it. maybe stars are the same.

when you turned away, your hands clutched the wheel
like it's the heart that leaped out of your chest.
my name is not velvet to you: you speak it
as though it's the last call for boarding
on a ship doomed to sink. it meant light once,
back in those days when i was still golden.
i have not been for a while now, ever since
i tarnished myself with all this doomed talk
of the escape velocities we'd never reach.

i couldn't figure out a way to love that didn't feel like
your slow-motion car crash. i promise i asked the moon about it.

despite our burning horizon, there is a version of the story
where we both make it. there is an ending out there
where i still pick up the pieces, but at least you're far
and the sky is not a wreckage of once-bright lights.
you do not get to return. i do not get to follow.
this is the tragedy that we call mercy.

the fallows are quiet this time of year. one wonders
what gets buried here, what there’s still room for.
if there’s space, i might bring the ghost on my ceiling along,
ask her if we are far away enough yet for her to feel
a deserter’s relief. i will feel the answer as a held breath.

this is not a land that pretends to love you, and it is trying
to chase me away as much as i mean to leave it behind.
i've been staring up at its messenger for months now: she's saying
i'm starting to match the paint cracks in the walls, a canyon
stuck on its jagged path and beginning to atrophy. give me
less sky, more hawks to let me know i do not belong here,
a lie that i am not running in circles: i’ve become the moth
obsessing with another flame, the echo screaming back at itself,
a copycat killer with nothing new to say through the knife.

when i lock eyes with what lurks in the field, i do not flinch.
i am familiar with hauntings. i will walk away, but not unchanged.

soon, i will be there to see the evergreens turn amber
and the foghorns downhill will wake me up in a cold sweat
when they howl at my overstayed welcome. when it happens,
i'll take my mother's car keys and race myself to the mountains
just to remember why i returned at all. it will all make sense
when i am above the harbor, wondering what i would have done
for a chance at holding something bright. i was born in motion,
along with everyone from the stubborn city that made a living
from shoving travelers into northern winters with a promise
that thawed too soon. we are all searching for something,
my mother says, and some of us are unlucky enough to find it.
most of my heroes are dead, gone in smoke trails on clear days
or hungry fires behind locked doors. it's up to me to decide
if i should connect those constellation dots or bury them too.

the industry secret no one ever dares to admit is that
you can make those stars say whatever you want them to.
well, you want sunlight, or at least the illusion of it; i'd like
the void between planets, made harmless by my inability
to understand or believe there are things i'll never get to reach.
you prefer the hum of half-sleeping cities— i'll take the silence
of a night that doesn't deal in lies. i've got craters of teeth marks
from the one time love tried to find me that'd make you shiver,
and you don't mind suffocating in an atmosphere too heavy
for me to find my wings in. there is one thing we can agree on:
nothing out there is worth never coming back from. if only
we realized that before we sold our souls for one-way journeys.

a home built between withered gold and a cruel sky shudders:
it is crumbling under the weight of living in its own grave.

this is one of many places you will find yourself when trying
to find somewhere to deal with the pain of outliving
a dead century, one we shot point blank a quarter in.
i will feel it when i look my younger sibling in the eyes
and do not tell them about the war i would start for them
with the bloodhounds baying for their bones. america wants a god,
or something like one: all i've got is a soldier's vow, a fire at my feet
and too much time to burn. none of it keeps me warm at night.

the timbers creak with the ache of my presence here.
i used to be able to speak to god in full sentences:
if i still could, i'd ask for the mercy of soft earth around my coffin.

after the dream where i climb out of a black hole and look back
only for it to speak to me in my own voice, i learn the hard way
what my science books left out. something died for me to be here
and i was never taught to shine like it. something turned cold
just for me to build myself a funeral pyre and call it a heart.
you can only tear yourself apart and restart so many times
before it becomes clear you are only debris held together
by an imitation of gravity. if you're not worth the stardust,
the only thing left to do is wait for your own collapse.