0. Self-insert as narrator: 
[ i cannot look you

in the eye / tell the story

without telling it ]
i am in flight again: [  ] is a name unspoken:

i am creating a home without boxes: [  ] is an extended phase:

i am rehearsing a memory: [  ] is a re-run

repeating: i am quietly imploding:
cascade of stars. awakening.

[  i am something other

than what i th/ought  ]
the irony comes after a premature wedding / everything created is bound by its context /

that is, space and time / so i will forgive myself later / for now, the next iteration:
1. Self-insert as a story:
Star Trek Voyager is an odyssey – an impossible

& endless homecoming. i start to believe

in impossible feats like survival:
in the face of destruction & death

the starship rebuilds itself again.

the crew renews its memory each episode,

no trace of the last trauma

[ i will remember this later,

post- the edge of my known world

when i excise the boy from my poetry ]
2. Self-insert as Chief Engineer:
Lieutenant B’Elanna Torres is a mirror:

angry / lost /  confused / conflicted / alone 
half-Klingon & half-human, B’Elanna

cleaves & falls into herself, a shattered identity
 [ relate / recognise / reflect / become ]
3. Self-insert as space:
grow obsessed with a gravity i can’t escape / a black-hole anomaly / can’t get enough / don’t realise

i’ve fallen in love with a fictional character / all that misplaced longing projected into nightly viewings:
she sees my pent-up longing, all that stifled ache /

i am begging to be seen / i am guilty for wanting it
what it comes to:

fanfiction is a necessary salve

– i falsify into re-tellings:
#StarTrekVoyager #f/f #Torres/Janeway #Kathryn/B’Elanna

#angst #femslash #lesbians #slow burn
in the blue-lit dark i learn / what i had never known of desire.
4. Self-insert as Captain Janeway:
nothing is simple about confronting fear

when flung into a distant quadrant. 	which is to say

at first

                                                i looked away
from [ memory / mirror / mouth / monster ]

or: the answer i seek
5. Self-insert as alien lifeform:
i sleep next to the boy

not with him.
my alien body

my alien longing.
6. Self-insert as audience:

follow the fanfic to its logical conclusion:

the captain and chief engineer’s lusty affair,

a hook-up in the Jeffries tubes.

learn how to pleasure another woman

in some far-off impossible

future
a fiction twice, three times removed.
[ the strangeness of a future where

interspecies relationships are widely accepted,

but two women never fall in love. ]
7. Self-insert as a starship:
my body a ship dead in the water.

my body a wreckage in the deep –
number seven searching seasons before i return
to myself /       ruptured.                                 reborn.                                        rebuilding.