Science Fiction: A Love Poem

My junkie best friend,M., hoards sci-fi pulp mags,files them in tubs in his basement.On one of our good nights,he digs up curling issues

of Analog and Asimov’s for us to readon his parents’ porch, smokingand searching for a favorite poem

about giant crabs attackingAtlantic City. We’re on fireas only high people can burn.In our subdivision, all the greenis curbed and contained, a handful

of gravel can be scooped upand launched like a satellite, hurledat the dew-stippled sidingof our parents’ houses. But it’s easierto hit our veins, the beauty

and danger of themyawning like plumeriaon the moon. I don’t need to read

the story M. shares, I know the humanfear of Paleozoic consciousnessaimed at our destruction. I’ve read

scientists have provena crab feels pain when it’s boiled—shocked once, it retreats in its shellat the signal of another. Only peoplekeep going back for more. Tonight,

painkillers wrap my skin in angora fur.My mind, a knife in the velvet bagof my body. M. is talking about

his favorite philosopher, Wittgenstein,how he berated a colleague’s wife

on a walk. She’d simply said,What a beautiful tree, and hestarted in, what do you mean

by “beautiful,” what do you meanby “tree.” I listen from my slabof concrete under the overdetermined

sky at the edge of our Northeastmegalopolis. I think our landwill be frontier againsomeday, as the writers foretell,when what we’ve built

falls down. M. puts a story in my hand,in which the machine asks his creatorwhy evolved responses beatcoding If A, then B. But what if

there is no evolution,beyond the good daysof the dope we share and its reliableresult? Other days we’re mute,pacing his garage, waiting for

an asshole dealer who never calls. Bothresigned to be the other’s versionof love on offer, which is

a kind of score, but cutwith floor cleaner. If Wittgensteincould see us, he’d say there is noordinary language for what we are,nothing to tie us

to this manifold of planetsstamped in the pulp we read. Sci-firequires the rules of any given

universe follow logic, like ruleson Earth. No world willrecognize us otherwise.