This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Elizabeth Vignali, is from The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons by Acre Books in 2020.
Columbus, Mars
Just when we agreed
we’d overreached, touched
that ragged, final edge,
the next continent began
drifting toward us, floe
shushing its own pink name.
At first, dreamed up—
a soap bubble’s
laminous prism—
then, the separate colors
clicking into focus.
Then, embers. Shore of ash.
Like the old world’s
temperas, it darkened
the longer we threw our light upon it,
though we still claimed
each crater rim,
what beveled just below
the surface. Each had its memory
of water, rust like a bathtub’s ring.
Red sky at night,
sailor’s delight. . . .
We were half-drunk when
we landed, cruel on our own iron taste.
Out of thin air, we became
toponymists, touched every place
we’d named:
alluring transfixed
fertile? inclined to love
Who would stop us
from drawing this map too,
in a girl’s naked image?
Hail the Santa Maria, full
of plastic grace. We bottled
and vialed minerals, new flora,
scrawled our stories
on her cabin walls—
in white ink, a mythic code—
tell the kids:
Long ago, a fleet of men
let their parachutes bloom
over desiccated ground.
The lost blue pilot felt
the wind tear at his face
just before his feet touched down,
his mind gone blank, like sailcloth.
