Three Poems
Elizabeth Wilcox

Day 7

They have assigned seats according to function & I am at the window for those who have irregular heartbeats, who can see their veins through the skin of their breastbone

*

The man who can juggle gets to sit by the ladder, the man whose job it is to die is by the hatch

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Can you tell time? Command Station asks. I have to think about this for a minute or two.

*

The man whose job it is to die is slowly rising from his chair

he is covered in yeast

I wonder how he can breathe in there, I pause to consider turning into a loaf, slicing myself up.

*

Out the window we are approaching Vega and I think about how satisfying it must be to shine constantly at 0



Day 35

Standing on this side of the room, I can see the spot where I stood
yesterday & willed the floor to open up onto

*

& yes my eyelid is still over there

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A line of men with buckets on their heads can still feel their way to
the hour coming for them. It gets harder the longer you're away, the longer you're invisible.

*

Sometimes I can hear the neutrinos whispering directions to me in the re-circulated air. Sometimes I imagine I am one.

[begin transmission]

when we find what you are looking for will you let us feel our bodies again



Day 36

Before you can pin a thing down -- I mean really hold its chin in your hands -- it's dead, or exploding. I've tried to explain this to them, I really have, but it's on and on with the instruments & the measurements & the log book &

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that day before we launched all that was left of a man bird I knew was two gray feathers on the sidewalk

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on the other hand the day I will walk the redshifted light out of the black hole will be a day of utter dancing, of dead sprints, of gravitational cartwheels

*

the latest from Command Station

1. I will be lively in the way I breathe when standing still
2. I will be lively in the electrified paralysis of my eye as it looks to the page for its cue
3. the whole universe of me in motion while at rest: one hand on my chest can throw the hole whole thing out of spacetime in a blink

*

I keep telling them my mouth doesn't feel quite right

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