Coring Europa
Enough marks enough.
Visible to a severed eye,
tidal striations leave a fractured rust system,
fibrous corroded Haeckel matrix.
The frills that Ernst set to plate rust stentacular lace that scars
are gone.
Europa painted in rust unkempt lesions stretch
blistered over incubed
iron heart lagging
iron heart laggicollapsing surely
(they’re projecting)
at its own rate
in the body mantle.
Voyeur saturating, lens gawking.
Locked in and pulled, eye strains as
witness to stress rending
the discordant surface of the moon
the disccalmly shifting of the mwithout sync
turning upon itself ing of the mtorsion flush.
Cassini brushes a hand over the marble
heldsini in tow,
offering a vicarious rusblink rust sof,
offeringof, a second, infinite agar slice,
votive inhalation rust snot the syllable,
offeringno such utterance comes until years further.
The breath catches the entirety
offeringfrom a screaming distant eye,
so Europa didn’t name itself.
You may know that – it’s classified.
The link/lock bound via warp,
Europa pulledound in bodied tandem.
The great red eye pulling blood to surface,
vascular ice housing a sickening light I couldn’t touch you
vascular ice houand I apologise
vascular ice houfor that profound weakness.
Ernst can’t draw me,
Galileo can’t observe the blurred features
reproducing out of taxonomy,
bodies exerting themselves
within bodies.
induction rhetoric
Vibrations in fowl blood read back
against the scouring pan
our own too-warm urgency of leeches
divines arrhythmic lips formed
into a chitin bell.
Plumbed of narcissism, now channels open,
I have to imagine treading
a path in thorough time tongue colliding
catching clicks from oblong bone-dice, scuffle feet
and sticky threads of dopamine hang brittle in the light.
The glorious solidity shatters, melting sacrament
into hollow arid mouth. So what you’ve done is ingestion rather
I don’t,
however, believe that I heard a damn thing
proving me wrong leaving me still wretched against
the horrible want of ridding weight. Would that endling meant culmination
and that a failure to acknowledge fault meant endling,
rather than simply what has been left
when I take away what can be used.
Toxic crusade emulsified in brawn, no apogee
so I might not produce the last and best word.
An alternative to that
begs for non-associative thinking.
If in that moment I held in my head
the crimping neck, fluster words not mine crackling
before they bolt from my mouth, stumbling,
the pleated cord of a dress
pressing against dense wheatgrass,
could I think outside inevitability?
The burnt autumn
caught in its smoke and frost
that breath I made explicit.
We hardly ascribe intention
to staying here, the orangery with its warm floor,
the brokered dust giving depth to the falling smile
and in that movement of saying what it will be,
countless consecutive decisions
are made for and from us.
I think of specificity as placing,
I think a naming
I think thus articulating
I think an exactness
not necessitating
I think any kind of success. Someone picks their words
I think once.
To my mind it is a condensation, placing monarchs in boxes
and fixing them through the spine
with steel
in their place.
A state of maintenance is precarious.
Image credit: NASA / JPL / DLR, a view of the trailing hemisphere of Jupiter’s ice-covered satellite, Europa, 7th September 1996, via Wikimedia Commons.
The long, dark lines are fractures in the crust, some of which are more than 1,850 miles long. The bright feature containing a central dark spot in the lower third of the image is a young impact crater, provisionally named “Pwyll” for the Celtic god of the underworld. This image was taken by the solid state imaging television camera onboard the Galileo spacecraft.
This is part of ROT, a section of The Learned Pig exploring multispecies creativity through modest tales of collaboration and coexistence amidst world-ending violence and disorder. ROT is conceived and edited by Julia Cavicchi.