HOW TO BUILD A TOWN
a poetry collection by Joshua Mathews Cook
Coffee cups steamed in our hands in the conference room. The project had been greenlit: maintain life’s momentum in a new distant colony. Our job was to outline the deliverables, action items, and metrics for success. The engineers would arrive first with their load of parts and materials. Space dozers and space cranes. The little town would be assembled in the red dust.
When the bedraggled travelers arrive and uncramp, eased from a two year slumber, now begging for death, how would we coax from them love? Fertility?
Using this here Gantt chart, what will get this society to quit dangling from its Mother? When do we timeplot the umbilical snip?
Sometimes walking through the produce section reminds me of you. Such a weird place to be nostalgic. My heart doesn’t remember grocery shopping together. (We didn’t often.) It doesn’t remember eating together. (We were usually watching something anyways.) My heart remembers picking out what to cook for you.
It was a way to love, even when it took forever and we were both starving. And it was a way to love, even when it didn’t come out right and I was embarrassed. Still, I loved cooking for you in your kitchen, sometimes with no shirt on. Just living our life together then.
I got what I wanted for a little while.
A man can be both father and son, lost between generations. Forever looking up, hoping for an approving gaze, while others look up to him, just as unnoticed. He can have a wound that never heals. Then he dies from it. Then his kids die from it.
In darkness, fire burning, the sleeve of his life catches. He becomes a liability. Flames race up his arm, up his back, flickering. While everyone sleeps, he slips over the edge, onto the rocks, into the water, and puts himself out. Floating, skin hissing, half consumed, waiting, hoping for a shuttle off-planet, but nothing arrives.
There is no shuttle. There is no other world.
One day, you’ll have moved on and you’ll remember him. You’ll be alone staring into your cup or out the car window or you’ll see similar shoulders somewhere.
You’ll remember the parts that made you laugh. Big ears. The moment you caught an interest. When he playfully used a reporter voice, “Signing off live from the bedroom.”
You never did think he’d be with you for very long, but he was a beautiful person. When you hear of his death one day, you’ll think of him as young, winking. You’ll remember the holidays you spent together. And the fact that he stopped having nightmares during the time that he knew you.
There are times when you must take leave from familiar life. Eject rapidly. Protect yourself from harm. Commit an abandonment, if you need to. Clear your accounts in full flight. Escape into darkness.
Some think death will be an escape, but it’s not. The dirt I become makes the path of your future. Or I’ll be moistened, loosened, warmed by the sun, and seeded. Maybe I’ll be a medium of reproduction. Or food for beautiful men, hopefully. I’ll integrate with bodies traveling the universe. I definitely look forward to that! Being born and reborn and reborn, nobody being the wiser.
It’s the universe’s great big secret: we are here for good.