An alarm blares, startling me awake and turning the yellow light of the ship orange. I steady myself against the wall as the ship tips with a ceremonious groan. “Captain, what’s going on?” I shout.    Captain Garber brushes past me, his scraggly beard grazing my shoulder as he calls to a nearby crew member. “Identify the nearest planet.”    I shoot him a hard glare. Not even forty, and Captain Garber refuses to be anything but an old geezer. In light of the ongoing commotion,

Four girls went into a room a very long time ago and none of them left. They lived in the partings of each other’s hair. They were not real and were not seen in color to any strangers. Their braids browned and blonded and their lips pinked for nobody in particular. Their secret Kodak smiles were upside down and fuzzy-- handling of the tools still clumsy. Needed work. Diamonds sewn into their clothes delay the inevitable. The whole ordeal is arduous and the men are molested by

It was just things that happened which I’m plenty allowed to add the list,  counted plastic beads on a string falling to be with their friends before the inevitable clasp cordons them off to their proper time And no matter the melodramatic songs and late-night steering-wheel-thumping swerving drives to corner stores that landmarked it all, placards in field guides sorted by sex and molting, decorated with pictures of you or someone very similar to you, all learning from yours

Which I used to assume was warm even this far up along the coast because I thought all beaches were hot; don’t you know that the world keeps existing when I stop visiting in the summer You do too, outgrowth of a segment like a centipede leg (one of hundreds but not thousands) rooted in places you can never rip off except in shaggy chunks But object permanence fails me; I forget you when a trinket falls out of a shoelace  The third girl to drink up native strands of fog in gul

Endangered! Now you’re endangered, racing down population graphs sloping into verticality, free fallen into other countries you will move to when you can finally find them on a map when there is nobody like you except a long time ago and who knows where but maybe you And they all changed into sensible shoes or else they got stuck to it and it wrapped around them too tight and came down their throats and choked them at an embarrassing age, sad how these things happen but you h