Dear Mars

Inspired by Nora Treatbaby’s Dear Earth

Dear Mars,
On TikTok, too many people use satisfying
to describe other people’s work,
for example, someone painting a lawn green,
cutting honeycomb for the ASMR,
sanding wood in a straight line.
I spent too much of today scratching that itch,
satisfying an unspecified need—
Mars, most things down here are mislabeled.
I’m sure you’d understand,
you war-named silence
of inhuman craters and sleeping core, patient
swivel of science from one apocalypse
to the next, an icy retirement
interrupted by each newly-proposed development.
They turn to you when things start to look bad.
I wish I could say I don’t understand
the tidal appeal of the desolation next door,
but because it was excised from history,
I had to invent my queerness
out of fantasies of the end of the world,
so I’m familiar with the appeal of a rock
as dusty as the lips of a benediction
and as unforthcoming as its promises.
In my version of the apocalypse,
we were the last two people in Los Angeles.
We built a fire, I broke my shoulder,
and she cleaned the break with first aid skills I’ve been meaning to review.
It took 4 years to recognize that this make-believe
injury pointed to a real one. At the time, I was happy
leaning back, eyes closed, and picturing capable hands
on my collarbone, saying lie still, lie still
and let us fix you, Mars, you with that loss
they want to call utopia, you with that silence
they want to salvage for parts.
They look to you at the end of seasons,
to your finite availability.
I, too, am finessing a kind of passivity
that will allow me to have everything I want,
coaxing my dissatisfaction out of the crawl space
below the habitual tense where I used to sit
and cry. Mars, if you have a spare moment,
please send a bit of red stone I can hurl at bank windows
and maybe an extra piece to scrub the heels of my feet.
Bestie, tell me I’m ok, tell me to shut my mouth
around the taste of your rust-red hypothesis.