Even the bones are gone,
mingled with the fish who fed on flesh,
ground into grains of sand and salted
like conquered earth or food stored for winter.
But deep, deep, within a maze of metal,
rising like tombstones from windblown grass,
the empty shoes of the dead still stand.
They await the last trumpets–mountain of fire
instead of ice bloodying the sea–keen lowing woe
like a ship’s horn in the dark to call them home.
My abuela wants to know what happened to the men who go up and down. Muy peligroso, she tells me, very dangerous. I don’t know what she means, so I shrug. Yo no sé, abuela. On the TV, I hear Hall and Oates try to persuade someone to bring back that lovin’ feelin’, whoa that lovin’ feelin’ cause it’s gone.
My abuela complains that her feet hurt. She sits in a recliner so I ask if she wants me to raise the footrest, and she smiles. Aye, si, por favor. Her ankles are webbed with spider veins, skin like rice paper. Her swollen feet are stuffed into brown loafers. Why are you only wearing one sock? I ask. Yes, I’m wearing two socks, she says. The credits roll on the TV. Tom Cruise slips on a pair of aviators. Was he ever that young?
The movie gives way to soccer, pre-Olympic matches that the US is winning and Cuba is losing. My abuela says all the Cuban players are brown sugar, mulatico, miranlo. We watch them pass the ball back and forth. She moves her legs and grimaces. I ask what’s wrong. My knees hurt, she says. I ask if she wants me to put the footrest down and she smiles. Aye, si, por favor.
Hall and Oates are still crooning to me. I need your love. Bring it on back. And then, baby, I know it. I know what she was asking me earlier. Tom Cruise. Top Gun. Abuela, I say, the men who went up and down. ¿Si? The men are okay, and the girl comes back at the end. She smiles. Que bueno.
I’ve got another article up for Mass Effect Week at Medium Difficulty, about how the Mass Effect series exhibits a lot of the qualities of the original epics. And some of the literary ones, too. It is, dare I say it… EPIC?! That’s one thing BioWare always strives for: large-scale, life-or-death, cataclysmic struggles between good and evil and really, really snarky. Go big or go home, unless your home is on Earth, because I hear that’s on fire or something.
I’ve got an article up on the new gaming criticism site Medium Difficulty. It’s about my struggle with moral conundrums in video games, and how having a baby affected my decision-making process. Do any of you have similar problems, or am I the only silly goose who sometimes can’t separate self from player character?
non est ad astra mollis e terris via
-Seneca the Younger
If Sputnik hadn’t been made from a missile
casing, would we have reached the moon?
22 days of a terrible beep, beep
while worried men in shirtsleeves smoked
filterless cigarettes and looked up
in fear instead of wonder. Cold war
old as when Aeneas taunted Turnus
to wing his way to the stars or hide
underground, deep as secret silos
stacked with death.
So we raced up into the black, but
not so far that we couldn’t look down,
eyes wide as the oceans below
tugged into tides by a gray marble
once worshiped as a goddess,
vessel for the first footprint ad astra.
But science, no matter how many countless
teeming stars shine as beacons on distant shores,
fails to ignite our restless souls.
Instead, we cringe and wait for the red god,
the next great war, to goad us farther
than an empty base in a Sea of Tranquility.
