The Grief as the Universal Translator on Star Trek

Say father and it says
first horse.
Say my love
and it says the wild.
These planets are all
my planets, their tongues
my lost and speeding insect songs.
Come on, Scotty,
everybody dies in the stirred-up gel
of somebody’s transporter.
Haven’t you ever beamed back
divided? And what’s this backward
language now? It says
my baby’s gone missing
when all that blew up
was a world.
 
 
 

Amy Miller’s full-length poetry collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. Her writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, Tinderbox, Willow Springs, and ZYZZYVA, and her most recent chapbook is I Am on a River and Cannot Answer (BOAAT Press). She lives in Oregon.