BY HOLLY PAINTER

We want to break alien hearts and

know our prospects are infinite.

We want to be cosmic nomads

smugglers, hitchhikers, stowaways

twenty-thousand clicks from home.

We want to jet between planets

like generations of comic book heroes.

We want to wear glass bobble-heads

and bright spandex and bounce around,

timing our trysts to the shadows of rings.

We want to colonize luminous worlds

with binary stars twirling above.

We want to settle down,

terraform new earths

where nothing’s ever lived before.

We want to holiday beside methane seas,

barter with moonrocks and satellite parts.

We want Vulcan accountants,

Cylon spin instructors,

the worlds after the wars.

We want to die in space.

Did you know that no one

has ever really floated away and

run out of air screaming as they watched

the spaceship become a pinprick?

We dream of it at night and wake up wet

and die instead of too many burgers

and smashing our cars together.

Holly Painter is the author of Excerpts from a Natural History (Titus, 2015) and My Pet Sounds Off: Translating the Beach Boys (Finishing Line, 2020). She teaches at the University of Vermont and is working on a book of cryptic crossword poems and an interview project about obsolete jobs.