Free Our Andromeda by Brenda Shaughnessy

Nemesis

    The sun has its nemesis, evil twin star,
    not its opposite but its spirit,
    undead angel,

    extra life. Another version.
    The Andromeda Galaxy bears children
    who become us, year after ancient,

    ridiculous year. The children,
    the alternatively filled selves unrecognizable
    to our faeries, our animals and gods:

    us utterly replaced.
    The kids we were, rejected like organs
    donated to the wrong body.

    Why aren’t they dear to us?
    Why is that child least loved
    by its own grown self?

    If you aren’t me then be banished from me,
    weird orphan with limp and lisp.
    Who, nameless brainsake, are you?

    Not my substance or my shadow
    but projectile vomit, a noxious gas.
    Don’t be me, please don’t be me,

    says the adult, looking back into wormhole
    as if jumping into foxhole.
    Not me, never again: that terrible child

    with the insufferable littlesoul
    and bad mom and sameself sister,
    and balky, stalky brother

    and monotone uncle and messed-with cousins,
    and let’s not even talk about the father,
    the fater, pater, hated, fattened, late, latter dad.

    Perhaps the Andromedans are such early
    versions of us we can’t hate yet, ghosts
    or our pre-living selves, earliest babies.

    Perhaps they’re only life
like,
like
    a robot cook or a motion detector,
    not like a dog we love and know,

    or claim to know,
    who nonetheless attacks grandma
    somehow. We say so, said so, toldya so.

    That’s what you get for believing in aliens,
    for replacing our earhorn of plenty
    with a megaphone of corpsedust.

    Listen, it’s moving closer, the Andromeda
    Galaxy, this other us, this museum of mucus
    and keyboards and keyboard fingertip records

    that their governments are already optimized
    to keep post-digitally. All of which looks
    much more like a craps game to us, a hinky

    life-filler, time-killer, the best selection of credit
    card pill extensions with rapid-release hypo-air
    no one but addicts can tolerate.

    Only 2.5 million light-years away, lessening
    daily, and that’s collapsible
    space, of course, made of light. Just flip

    the switch and poof. We’re there.
    The space, then, the dog-run-sized length
    between the golden retriever

    and the Labrador retriever,
    isn’t so much space as time, and since time
    is breath…well. Take a deep one.

    We have all day, as a matter of objective fact.
    Slip on a glossy patch of antimatter
    and I’ve inhaled my unutterable

    opposite potential self, smeared out
    the tracing of my nemesis: Olympic
    gymnast teen me or seventh-grade best friend

    Shannon, or the cricket-eating
    self-sister with the spiny-belled name I dream
    at night and call out but can’t ever know

    in this world. Such a thing is called a soul?
    A personality? Sometimes diagnosed “possession”?
    Nemesis, namesake, nevermore.

    O funny other self,
    how I long to know you! You were ingested
    so easily, absorbed like a lotion

    in the desert. Even in the evening.
    For there are no light years. Years are heavy.
    There is only light. It never bends:

    that’s the property it mortgaged in order
    to pick up speed. But parallel lines can meet
    just like that if someone breaks the rules.

    Some criminal sharing my name
    or an alien name sharing my crime.
    The rules are there are no rules.
Lingua franca.

    Isn’t the space between what is
    and what coulda woulda Buddha been,
    that same space between short skull

    and long face, that oiled jaw hinged
    for supple expression, for saying
    and blaming and braying and allaying

    and naming:
I this
not
I that,
tit not tat,
    want not waste, and
yes
not
yes, but…
    What your mother

    tells you over and over to shut,
    to smile, first to not talk to strangers
    and then be kind to them.

    To sponsor the tail of another winner’s
    horse. To Go for It.
    To become something in this life.

    But once the gardenias
    are floating in seawater for the themed gala
    of your body, this special night,

    they are dying,