Matriarchal
by Jennifer Seaman Cook
We wake again pleading for the last time,
a forked tongue once lost between planetary
failures. Their rotation had become dangerous
like birthing hips on the move, either circled
in naked light, or coiling an orbit around
the throat of some dark diviner’s rabbit.
Anti-gravity had taken its unsteered toll,
the air having long been pressed out under
mean flesh, gaze wild and glassy. Gasping
a final incantation at the closing of eyes,
she prepares herself for the difficult
reentry, asks me to please cover up
her body with the stained-blue skin
of a warrior, or perhaps the fine cloth
of an ancient priestess, smiling the creased sorrows
of our plastic spacesuits back to me. She understands
that we will not come this time with grappling
hooks, pressure gauges, flood lights, steel cages,
tightly bound pages, ticking timers, and tested rules, all
these dusty instruments for making wasted spaces
between a concentric star
and a ghost that cannot answer.
I will lay in its powdery surface
and feel the rock beneath me.
