G-NT3806KSJP

Your Raygun



   


as the evaporating man
blows in the wind
six worlds away
you polish your raygun
with a multiwave smile
you humiliate my freezeray
we cohallucinate the mothermind
and dredge the atmosphere
for abandoned automaton children
as the last powder of him
drifts with the sunlight
two suns, your raygun
venus sings our praises
stars aligned, brazen in the darkness
the flag of the united planets
ragged in the wind
solar wind, two suns
in your most sincere voice
you recite a scene from barbarella
I spell out freezeray
after several cycles
you tell me you are trapped
on fonda-11, and cannot hear
the message from the neo-government
in your tears is the reflection of the sun
two suns, your raygun
what is worth the vacuum of
what is, who has mapped the flares of
the sun, two suns
you believe in me, your raygun
oh, I think, oh, there’s no place like home
there’s no freezeray, no mathmos
the waterspout flowing upside-down
yes that’s what I remember
the ashen taste on the barrel
of your raygun, alien angel
sunburn on the shoulders, two suns.







Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué is a poet and writer living in Chicago. He is most recently the author of Losing Miami (The Accomplices, 2019) and Madness (Nightboat Books, 2022), which was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award in Gay Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Foundation’s Four Quartets Prize. He is also co-editor of An Excess of Quiet: Selected Sketches by Gustavo Ojeda, 1979–1989. He is currently a Humanities Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago.