TW: psychiatric ward setting


Lila Andromeda was born May 18, 1999 
to migrant parents who trusted lucky numbers. 
The five points of a pyramid: 
a solid foundation to finalize and begin. 
Hello and welcome, 
that’s right, breathe, 
you’re on Earth with us now 
were their first words to her, 
immortalized in Momma’s diary. 
Lila called her Mo. 
She called her father Oon. 
No one knew why. It wasn’t like any word 
in their learned or mother tongue, 
but it was cute 
and they encouraged it. 

Am I still cute when my skin is purple 
and my ethereal body is flying past your moon?
[she asks the hospital psychiatrist]

Of course you are. [he says to placate her]
But see here, I’m showing proof
Earth is your place of birth.
You are human.

That’s what they wanted you to think.
[she says calmly, barely blinking]

Hello and welcome,
that’s right, breathe
because you are no longer 
absorbing sulfur through your skin
like on Mo’oonosoph.

Come again?

Mo…oh wait, that’s right. 
I’ve read your science books,
how you humans organize 
your limited knowledge.
My home is the satellite you call Phobos
orbiting the Blood Planet.

You mean the Red Planet. Mars.

That’s what I said.

Phobos is carbon-rich and crater-filled.

On my true skin, it transmogrifies
to sulfur, which we then absorb.
We inhabited the craters
before the forecast.

What forecast?

Mo’oonosoph is going to —
no I’m sorry, it would have happened
by the time I got here
…if I hadn’t gone back in time.
Well, I suppose future tense
is correct in this case. Never mind.
Mo’oonosoph is going to collide
with the Blood Planet.

Hello and welcome,
that’s right, breathe,
you have to oscillate your chest
to survive around water.
The cold dust is no longer your home.

But I want to go back!
I need to go back!

Doctor, you don’t understand.
I never got to see my home.
I was born there to be reborn here.

Doctor, you can’t understand;
you don’t have the technology to
transplant a neonate consciousness.

I want my purple skin!
I want my sulfur touch!
I want that cold dust
to freeze these tears 
I never would have known
had I not been human.

Hello and welcome,
Hello and welcome,
Hello and welcome home.

Home is not here.
Home is there, and it is there;
it hasn’t been destroyed.
They didn’t mean to send me back in time.
It was an unavoidable side effect
of emergency interplanetary travel.
A fortunate one if only I could
just go back.

I see my selenian source every night 
in my telescope. Last week
I couldn’t take it anymore. 
I had to go. I had to strip naked
in the dead dark winter when the new moon—

(Your moon, ludafokris! Men are so confusing!
You sometimes call it Luna 
when you aren’t naming Proper Places 
with common nouns like they’re the only ones.)

blackened the sky and I could see 
the one faint light hovering around 
Blood like a winking eye, daring me 
to launch myself against gravity
and return to meet my parents now younger
than I became on this polluted wet rock.

Let me go!

Lila, sweetie, you need to calm yourself.
Breathe…

I am not sweetie, and I am not Lila.
I don’t want to breathe anymore. 
I hate that I have to 
when we never did before. 

Why this planet;
why did this one have to be the closest
with community? I hate this community.
You’re all wasteful 
wretches, malicious malcontents.

Let me dive into the dirt.
The lovely, cold dirt.
The dusty dirt like in your deserts.
Send me to a frozen desert.
Or Antarctica after a blizzard.
The cold soft snow almost feels the same
as Mo’oonosoph. My ancestral memory
remembers the familiar comforts
of the old life. My old life
I never got to live.

My name is Larimi’mirishu
and my purple skin is coming through.
Hello and welcome to my truth.
That’s right, breathe, but not so fast.
That can’t be good. Here’s a bag.
Deeply now, there you are at last.

That’s right, breathe.
You’re on Earth with me. Now
let me cease to be 
your fantasy. I will leave 
this facility or you will 
see Phobos means Fear
after all. 

This poem was inspired by the songs “Hello And Welcome” and “Goodbye Milky Way” by Enigma, from the album A Posteriori.

The number in the title refers to the distance between Earth’s moon and Phobos. I calculated it by subtracting our moon’s average distance from Earth (about 238,900 miles) from Phobos’s distance from Earth (48.34 million miles). I know this is not accurate, but I like the number that resulted.

(c) 2022 Saralyn Caine. All rights reserved.