on space and the space in between by Sloan Asakura she is only 238,900 miles away, which is a distance almost too close to differentiate from the hollows of my body. she’s stitching time into memory, the nerves in their spines cheering, unspooling their screams from their ears, wiping their red hands on their white shirts and pretending the smell of copper is preferred. she keeps telling the stories. i keep listening to them, despite everything else i hear which is this: pay attention: every once in a while, the threads of the sun, the moons, and other great bodies of the universe, split open the heavens to the eye of man in sharp applause. and man watches from the window as light widens its palm around the frame, simultaneously awed and frightened, faithful witness to everything they can’t see. telescopes upturned, man seeks the secrets of gravity and color. it comes to them as dreams they don’t recognize as fact so they keep looking all their lives. and the aurora borealis is real but is best seen on long exposure shots and man doesn’t recognize this as a secret of color, only light and time. meanwhile, gravity is not at all a pull but a release, or perhaps instead it should be, which is half of its secret. when charon split in half, man chalked it up to ice and expansion and not the scream pluto let out when charon said he wanted to leave. charon’s violent orbit is startling to witness because no one’s used to seeing the dead move, especially this quickly, but indeed if we were pluto, we might be happy to swing some pile of bones around our heads like a lasso to catch shadow even if we can’t because it’s everywhere. visible to the unaided eye is venus as it might be seen from the moon it doesn’t have, its atmosphere occasionally parting and rolling out a white lullaby muffled by the vacuum of space so it sounds like a whisper pitched through gritted teeth. man sends a satellite to record the song and chalks the eerie tune up to the pitfalls of the western ear, as if venus hasn’t turned her face into her ribcage looking for more poison to kill herself with. man makes the metaphors and symbols, venus as desire, apparently all kinds. and the equation is man plus desire, any kind, equates to depravity and therefore violence but i’m not so sure this is a secret, but more an inevitability like god. i’d like to hang up now, but six hours in and things are finally getting interesting as suddenly all sentences start with but what could i have done—then, she’s telling the stories again, sulfur spilling out from the seams indicating the stitches were never pulled tight—time is weeping and memory is dead and sharing a body, it’s only a matter of time before— i’m hearing things again. man tells me to disguise the self inside some metaphors so as to write the poem before she dies, but what do we ultimately lose? time’s as far off as the moon.
it took a little time for me to know what to write here on the page, this poem is SO Brilliant to me, what it did to me first read, and is still is doing to me. Also, a very unique voice. Thank you, Sloan. Big congratulations on winning ONLY POEMS 2026 Poet of the Year Award! I see why.
Really deserving group of poems..my favorite is the Saturn one. It says so much about gaslighting