Illustration by Sue Babcock
On Earth, there is a Center I can’t read for Generation Ship Studies, what my son writes, one which collects our stories especially the “I” poems; about who we tell them we are. later, he told me My son tells me this is what we do the speaker was never himself. when we are trainees, or were Too intimate, those lines back on Earth: counselors counseled, about life here. given the same treatment as depressed Crises, I thought at first, clients are given. What I tell him would lie in nostalgia. when he feared he’d be forced into The case files fail my profession: here, there are few to note the real problem, choices we get to make. You were increments of loss lucky not to have to drift into it. of who we used to be. I tell him how strange it is That there is no self to have to develop a world- behind the experiences each poem sized mind when only a hundred made me believe them boarded this hollowed space and happened to him: I within a hollow space— could not bear that loneliness.
BIO: T.D. Walker is the author of Small Waiting Objects (CW Books, 2019), a collection of near-future science fiction poems. Her poems and stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Web Conjunctions, The Cascadia Subduction Zone, Luna Station Quarterly, and elsewhere. Walker draws on both her grounding in literary studies and her experience as a computer programmer in writing poetry and fiction. She blogs occasionally at her website: https://www.tdwalker.net