Abyss & Apex : Second Quarter 2006 : The Dimensional Rush of Relative Lives

When Theda slipped into
a life of leisure
on eleven planets,
she had no idea of
the alien opportunities
she would endure.

At the end of her
journey lay the instant
known as Earth.
Teeming as it was,
she remained human
among others as such.

She missed the sure
exaltations that stellar
realms had to offer,
the swift acceleration
and dimensional rush
of relative lives.

Most of all the slender
tripeds of Nine-Four-Three,
intimate in their bravura.

Someday she would teach
her children’s children
about the wages of space,
how in traveling from
one world to another
you are transubstantiated.

In that telling she would
conjugate the rules
of her digression
and the subsequent
definition of a self
she could not deny.

Illuminating her past and
its brash indiscretions,
she would prove without
the sun of a doubt
that the stars are fire.

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Bruce Boston has received the Bram Stoker Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Asimov's Readers' Award, and the Grand Master Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. He is the author of forty books and chapbooks, including the forthcoming collection Flashing the Dark: Forty Short Fictions (Sam's Dot, 2006). For more information, please visit his website or email him at bruboston@aol.com.