" . . .
the diaspora of human civilization is bound to go on
and out, as it always has done in the process of setting new
frontiers."
--Gerald K. O'Neill
1. Earth
The sky buzzed as always with its crossing traffic.
Then came the flash, a last photograph
before we disappeared, in negative color:
red trees reflected
in the orange pond,
the roses cool blue holes
in the garden's fire,
and the cloud, blossoming chastely
like an unused sun coming up.
This quiet. This
unimagined.
It was a dream stolen from a movie.
Even in sleep I had no other language
for it but film,
the art of light, light's preservation,
and broken from sleep I am
crazy with this fiction.
This morning the world has not ended,
is not transfigured.
Streetlights dim in the gray sky. The garish
dream lights blink out, in room after room
of this city block.
2. Off-planet: Mars
The horizon-line clear and arched as an orange.
Above it, blackness with stars, the faint
enormous corkscrew of the galaxy. Below it,
all ground is foreground. Every lazy step
reels more of the world in. Think of
Nijinsky, who told the reporter, Just leap
into the air, and pause a little.
Our heads are heavier than our hearts,
as we'd always suspected.
The two moons cross in the sky,
and the doubled shadows merge:
at my feet, then trailing
my drifting body, the black
body of a woman, foreshortened
and sexless in her bulky suit.
My breath is a storm in my helmet, and what
I see, I see through it.
3. Earth: Night Fallen
Through my window, with its glass
flowing year after year
into the base of its frame,
Mars is a dull red spot hanging over the warehouse,
and all I imagine about it begins
it is not like this: no rain trapping
the light on the surface of the black street;
no street. The movie must have ended
with the good people helping each other, the bad
looting and double-crossing and dying badly.
The good die well, or stand
brave and elegiac against the ruined backdrop.
--Wendy Battin
(published in Little Apocalypse Ashland, Ohio:
The Ashland Poetry Press, 1997)
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Pulsar
by Gene Frumkin
Poem
For My 60th Birthday
by Dick Allen
Now
That I Know What Feverfew Looks Like
by Elaine Equi
South
America
by Tom Raworth
Words
of Wisdom
by Mark Pawlak
The
Art of Poetry
by Bobby Byrd
Some
Anthropology
by Michael Heller
The
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by James V. Cervantes
Those
Sunday Afternoons
by Charles O. Hartman
The
News from Mars
by Wendy Battin
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