The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers

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Deep Space Crown

Out of the oval, we read darkness. Stars

glint like lost sequins or scales

numbering a knife’s black edge.

Libra tips, its precarious justice

just beyond our reach.

This outer world wafts a summer: hot metal, diesel,

barbeque. But the moon, matte as wax paper,

smells more like gunpowder than egg or bread.

We flip through white-ink novels

typed on endless—negative—space, our bodies

diminished or augmented, never quite to actual scale.

This is how a meter grows

into a mile. The mile spins itself into a stone,

whooshing out and on and on.

Whooshing on and on, our bodies

are live cultures trapped

in this white capsule. We name ourselves

after flora, epiphytes drifting

in a realm of cold gas. What we sweat

or breathe out will circle, eventually,

back into the drinking glass.

Any ship is a hermetic

world: an arrow tightened,

blunt head swallowing the nock.

So forget that blue-and-cloud earth

fading in the porthole. Whatever roots

we have will dissolve. Mostly air and dust,

we wheel within a wheel. A body sure gets around.

Within the ship’s sure body, a star wheel

replaces the wall calendar:

time’s squares redrawn

with spidery legs, framed in concentric circles.

I hear the ratchet click, the only real noise

between the worlds’ terrible blanks.

Tucked in my hollow space suit, I wanted

to be a rivet: my head brassy

and fixed, the analog in chaos.

But every human body

is a disaster, the fallout from old stars.

My brain is just a tangle of wire,

electricity clusters. My hair is recessive

rubble, all redshift and helium.

Imagine the sun as a red balloon, helium

colliding at its core. There, they say

a human’s mongrel of atoms

will weigh twenty-eight times more.

I would never trust any hand of god

over gravity’s colossal pull. How heavy

our limbs grow when faced with that

stove eye coming closer and closer.

Plasma smells like burning sugar.

On Earth, you dream of appliances

you forgot to turn off, children you abandoned,

and, if you’re lucky, the power to fly.

In space, you dream only of feet

touching down on warm sand or wood.

Just sand and warm stone: the universe

is a Zen garden, or her third cousin

once removed. Mechanical arms

rake the surface, meditating on grooves

and swirls. Occasionally, we hallucinate

water inside a gravel’s white spill.

Like the theater, space can render us

stiller than rock. When we do move, it is behind layers,

white scrim over cloak over skin. These costumes

keep us away from radiation,

the hot and cold knobs of other worlds.

What I would give now for a beach, the sand

white or red or basalt. My feet want

a real lip of water, not just a backdrop of blue.

Long ago, against a blue water backdrop,

we turned and turned, and mostly felt

nothing. We held ourselves up like trees

without wind. Whatever substance our spoon held

flowed straight from silver and into our mouths.

But now is not then.                  Now is not even

now. Clock hands, craving sleep,

sloth toward the next white number.

            To think I once imagined space

as the smooth texture of coins

or zeros, and never as that deep sap

that traps and always keeps. Never

as our own atoms, suspended in this colloid:

inside the dark, these stars we circle and misread.

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