In Slumber We Rehearse Our Days by Angela Acosta

31 lines
Issue 5 (Summer 2024)

She and I were just photons gliding
across galaxies warped by gravity,
the beauty of which eluded me
as artificial lights tugged at my eyes.

Call it shore leave,
call it a break,
plan it out as a month-long return.
Combine our schedules
to meet in the same century,
the same system,
the same dingy station.

The rustle of sheets jogs my memory—
she knows the choreography,
yet forgets to turn off the light nightly.
Asleep, we relax into thoughts of togetherness.

We never outlined the terms and conditions
of a relationship built on serendipity,
on travel nearing the speed of light,
and a shared love of xenobotany.

We’d have another conversation,
about a quasiplatonic sort of togetherness,
the tacit understanding of a shared wardrobe,
about when we could rendezvous again.

I want to say, we are not planning an EVA
with spacesuits and guide cables,
an intense eight-hour operation
after which we collapse in a heap.

We merely share a bed, cups of tea,
and though I—yes—I vetoed it once before,
my dreaming self sees the benefit of
permanently adding her name to the station’s roster.

Angela Acosta, Ph.D. (she/her) is a bilingual Mexican American poet and Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina. She is a 2022 Dream Foundry Contest for Emerging Writers Finalist, 2022 Somos en Escrito Extra-Fiction Contest Honorable Mention, and Rhysling finalist. Her writing has appeared in Copihue Poetry, Shoreline of Infinity, Apparition Lit, Radon Journal, and Space & Time. She is author of the Elgin nominated speculative poetry collections Summoning Space Travelers (Hiraeth Publishing, 2022) and A Belief in Cosmic Dailiness (Red Ogre Review, 2023). She has published on female life-writing, poetry, and literary personas in Persona Studies, Ámbitos Feministas, and Feminist Modernist Studies.
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