This series of poems addresses issues of race, identity, sexuality, and gender through the lens of popular media. This poem in particular reevaluates the relationship between the three main characters in Star Trek, addressing issues of unrequited love and queer loneliness.
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“You are my sounding board.”
It’s what you want to say to me
When your eyes meet mine,
When you’re leaning back in your chair,
Pins glinting in the electric light--
When you’re wearing your nebulous smile
Golden head cocked, chin pointed towards the universe
Another galaxy away, but what’s it to you?
If your chair had legs you’d tip right over
And I’d catch you.
I’d make my hands into ropes, tether
Your body to my body.
Hold you upright. Your gravity.
For god’s sake, I’d be your gravity.
“It’s a lot to promise someone out here.”
It’s what I want to say to you
When your eyes look past me,
When you turn to him and your eyes linger
Just one nanosecond longer than they should.
Sometimes I imagine seeing his blood,
Green and thick and foreign and fickle
So far away from what we are, from where
We come from. We still share that. Don’t we?
I believe we are something like twine.
Braided wire, a panel of the right stuff.
One short circuit, and I’d slip into darkness.
Into deep space. Into alternate dimensions.
Is that where I have to go to find you?
“Goddamnit, I’m a doctor, not a convoy.”
It’s what I want to say to you.
I stitch you up, salve your wounds.
Take your measurements, your vital signs.
I’ve done it a thousand times before.
He’s in your skin, in your bed. It doesn’t take
A mind reader to know I’m on the wrong end of a blaster,
Set to stun, and yet, when your beam hits my body
My insides guzzle out like gasoline
I hold them in, tight against me
Linger too long on love’s lost planet
Linger too long on things like Iowa,
Your mother. Your childhood dog.
Your dreams and ambitions.
“You will always be my friend.”
It’s what I say to both of you, just before I let go
My body falling into open space, my arms being
Pulled by strange gravity in two directions
So familiar I could go to sleep in it, like
Pajamas, a blue jumper, a glass of saurian brandy
Your voice--so familiar that weeds have grown over it
Twenty seven years. I could never really leave you.
I’m a doctor, after all. I’m a sounding board.
You tuck your hand in his hand.
It makes sense. In the end it really does.
He is the same sort of crazy as you. That figures.
I pour a double for myself, gauze my hurts, roll up my sleeves.
And when you call me to the bridge, I come.
