Impossible approaches, light sped,

I can’t read any more, carboniferous I

would burn by paragraph’s end; a signal, aliens

on page forty-two, plotted (curved, dashed)

untraceable, how I love home on page fifty-nine;

subtler aliens would cast a new Earth under

nearer, indifferent star-heated skies – given the effort

to visit this old planet, risk, cost, haven’t alien actuaries

audited? Beyond page one hundred and eighty-six, this calculus

of terns and gulls stitched over corduroy bays, jellyfish variables dotting

oceans of protein, material to build Qin monuments, labyrinths

of lost terracotta, everything we believed impossible, dactyl joints bending

the wills of atomic fish; what are we, what is home? this assemblage,

neon fractal mountains under violet vapour, under sulphur-tailed

manga comets, under scintillation marking out Mandelbrot tentacles,

and, by page six hundred, restlessly patient.



Note

Works referenced include: Jumpnauts and “Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang; The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin,

Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan, “Restaurant at the End of the Universe: Laba Porridge”, by Anna Wu; “The Demon-Enslaving Flask” by Xia Jia