503-JournalistReport

Journalist Report

05/03/14

Prepared by Christopher Cokinos

The poems are pouring out. I'm also keeping a lot of raw notes for a prose piece to work on later this summer. Here's the new poem:

Field Notes : Copy

--at the Mars Desert Research Station, Crew 141, southern Utah

A collared lizard pumps

on a rail by the Hab.

"Cap comm to EVA 1, do you copy?"

Sim as in

simulation, as in

simulacra, the palimpsest

of reference and gap :

unconformity. A few yards away

someone's built a low stone wall,

mock ruin of the extirpated

behind which striped dunes rise, gone

those Paleozoic shallows, boiling dehy dinner

inside, water trucked from Hanksville.

Levels drop. The bats fly at dusk.

They ping the air with their transmissions.

The suits we don, the rover we test,

the EVA to measure a rescue.

Between Engineering

and the GreenHab door

there's an imaginary

tunnel, a metal grate, safe

arbor with neither vines nor fabric,

so the body struggles

to pretend there isn't familiar sun, kind wind of

warming May. Body knows

we better take along. Body

has what those dunes know.

Body slides the cursor, copy and paste.

Things scuttle in, and our plants

sprout, night

crawlers writhe

in soil that we've made--Simulated

Martian Regolith--plastic cups

of cattails whose shots

could lash new portage

across the deepest canyon,

our gutted ark become a whip-tail there.

-Christopher Cokinos