Previously on Battlestar Galactica

Adolescence

It was, they discovered, a new and endless source of energy. Not stable (those rolling brownouts) but incredible. Efflorescing heat and light, great gaudy blooms of it like bruises, like lipstick dyeing the threads of a tissue. Peaking in kisses, mascara-lashed fireworks shooting off the charts.

At the brush of a hand, cut of an eye, thrill of the bridge, smoky nostril flare. Power.

Low-humming generators (jacked through the ear) and we adolesce at switchflick. All that knifeblade skinburn flowing (alcopop sweet) and spilling. Spillage. Spill.

Hangover

Oh, the vertiginous days of waste. Guilt gouting up like fossil fuels. No longer.

Hair of the dog stuck in our teeth. No sheets to hide between: cotton like a hair shirt. Nylon, fingernails on a chalkboard.

Chalk ground between teeth, we line our stomachs with the old ways. Silted through, chewing wild mint to still contractions churned up by carbonation.

Menstruation

They’d heard the jokes, the boasts, for years. But the morning that it happened. The headlines. Quarter of all adult males globally. Shedding zygotes epiphytically. Like an episode of Doctor Who. Polyclinics couldn’t cope: men seeping, weeping, swaddling their cocks in tea towels. For the moment.

It only took a week for the products to appear. Untaxed. Must-have. Free with this month’s GQ. What took longer: to realise how the balance had shifted (our stains the same). How the shared ebb drew us together. Drew the moon that little bit closer.

Fat

Turned out we were better at it: zero-g. It’s something you learn inside the skin, how to float, how to conjure grace against all obstacles. How to be outshone and keep – deftly – moving.

They had to make the suits roomier, but then there was no stopping us: connoisseurs of space – expansive not expansionist – we revelled in the neverending, our earths of flesh admitting no attrition.

We call ourselves full, after our sister the moon: whom we see without shadow.

Mothership

As a station. A promotion. Scatterstar your epaulettes. Billets temporary: nine month orbit or generation ship. Applications open to all who wear wings: waxing cyclically, not Icarene. Requirements: a certain density, flow monitors, gravidity at zero. To carry oneself aboard oneself.

Not radiation but nucleation: to divide oneself infinitively. To be plural as stars are; slower than light, condensing at the core. To revel in consequence, even at the event horizon: pulsing at the rim, all systems humming towards the brilliant parameters of night.

Birth

Brought forth by gravity, my first breath was earth: Earth’s earth, crated and shipped for experimental cultivation. And what grew — what I grew into. This revolution. Not quite what the lab coats intended.

From this mound, snake-shaped of loamy handfuls grasped by squatting women. They say that’s how River Woman shaped us: fisted, thumbing, a finger prised between our legs to let her in.

And out. I’ve never seen a river but remember. Like soil — blood-rusted — caught under nails: what it is to emerge. The onrush, rushing into space.

Hangover appeared as an Upstart poster, 3 of 144.

Sophie writes: Early exposure to Ursula K. Le Guin left me with a deep conviction that speculative fiction can change the world – a conviction supercharged by a book-length immersion in writing about the magical, non-realist Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love (Wallflower, 2009). Hence this sequential, evolving attempt at speculative poetry, because, despite its often cosmic metaphors, contemporary poetry (like daily life) features too few utopian feminist space communes. ‘Previously…’ (which you can hear on Archive of the Now) appears in my forthcoming second collection The Private Parts of Girls (Salt 2011), wherein ancient gods meet their match in grrrl power, will-powered flight is possible and punk is in the Lorcan air. Like my previous collection, Her Various Scalpels (Shearsman 2009), Private Parts strides out with queer confidence in culture-jamming, formal play and the endless shimmer of language.

Sophie on Archive of the Now. She’ll be reading with Nina Karacosta at Wurm im apfel on the 16th June, 8pm at the Cat and Cage, free admission.