By Michael Derrick Hudson

My bones thin to slivers inside my filthy rig. I’m the wheezy ghost
haunting a plastic suit of armor, the unshriven soul

expiring within an infidel. My dreams run antiseptic, anachronistic
and celibate while the past keeps unspooling somewhere

behind my pineal gland. Screws loose, I make up all sorts of stuff
to tell them, happy things with a convincing kink

of lonesome. They say it’s for the greater good as my DNA chars

like bacon at the edges and a universe tumbles past my bulletproof
porthole. A mechanical lung, a toothpaste tube supper,

the chemical toilet where every one of my clods gets categorized,

bagged and sterilized. I perform my tasks upside-down, tapping
an antiseptic keyboard or watering my million-dollar

seedlings and teaching a herd of space worms zero-gravity lessons
of reward and punishment. Mission Control applauds

these efforts remotely, electronically. On cue, I’ll smile for the kids
and urge them to work hard and stay in school, reading

with a pixilated grin from an inviolable script
plugging science, math, the digital approach to all our catastrophes . . .

But off-camera I coin better names for the Mission: Jugged Chimp.
Scrubbed Purpose. The Immaculate Reduction.

Canned Epiphany. Celestial Funk. Deficit Boondoggle. Minerva

Shrugged. Apollo Wept. My apostasy runs Ptolemaic, heliocentric,
chthonic, wrong. Patched-in and monitored, salaried

and pensioned, my pulse ping ping pings. I’m the life-support blip
on a faraway screen, another protocol, another

something else evaluated, budgeted, and all gotten down to a science.

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Michael Derrick Hudson lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Boulevard, Columbia, Fugue, Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, and other journals. He was co-winner of the 2014 Manchester Poetry Prize.