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upon being discovered (11/30)

just finished my 8th event in five days and today’s official prompt feels too hard for me but i do have a poem.

this is from aya’s last journal, which e— hid before aya could have it destroyed, and kept in spite of the edict to release the queen’s non-poetic memories.

she’s not speaking to me

the ship appeared
on the seventh cycle of night
a stain spreading on our
vermillion moon

i hadn’t turned off the trace
we hadn’t agreed
and
i’d left us beacon, calling

she’s furious
she says i don’t love
not the way she does

she says i’ve broken her

she’ll forgive me –
what she asked was too selfish
to make this planet our island
to live until we died?

and what of our miracle child?
to leave them
in some ultimate solitary cell
afloat in the fulness?

there is room on obsidian
we can still live our lives
our eternal duet

we can hold ourselves apart

she says they will reel us in
to their experiment of
building a world

seeing the mote there
steadily blotting out the
small and molten moon
i had a moment’s doubt

could the rest of our days
be this isolated pleasure
the unknown of only each other
the sweetest living i’ve known

what kind of love
makes us forsake our people?
it would be better not to love
than to become so myopic

she will forgive me.

i told her we were to mean
more to history than
a pile of bones amongst
glowrocks on the edge of
a baby solar system

she said
bones that know joy
are never alone