“First Sojourn” by Angela Acosta

Against the calm hum of artificial gravity,
my first exoplanetary foray four generations deep
clenches neural networks into a colorful cacophony
of senses and sentience as we descend at Mach 15.

Suddenly hills and valleys come into view
and I call upon my ancestral tongues to name
all that was retained in our morphology.
Colina. Hill. Vega. Valley. Tierra. Earth. Laguna. Lagoon.

I imagine these Spanish words once spoken
by malevolent voices by conquistadores in las Américas
so I ground myself on cushioned 0.75 g soil
by sending a message to the sky
and building an hogar: hearth and home.

I set off into dusty woodlands
as nettles prickle my skin.
I almost think for a moment that AI
is wafting evergreen trees into my olfactory receptors.

Cresting over a hill,
I recite the new requirimiento, rewriting Columbus:
to nurture xenobiology and honor all life,
free of any ruler over planetary bodies.

Firm in the belief of this testimony,
my compadres and comadres bear witness and kneel
to a humble offering of synthesized foods
and centuries won quantum physics.

We will make mistakes, transitioning
back into our own flesh, but here
we put newly told stories in our bellies
and exchange astronomical calculations
for a cozy humility and quiet wonderment.

Angela Acosta, Ph.D. is a bilingual Latina writer and Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina. She is a 2022 Dream Foundry Contest for Emerging Writers Finalist, 2022 Somos en Escrito Extra-Fiction Contest Honorable Mention, and Utopia Award nominee. Her speculative work has appeared in Somos en Escrito, Apparition Lit, Radon Journal, and Space & Time. She is author of Summoning Space Travelers (Hiraeth Publishing, 2022) and A Belief in Cosmic Dailiness (Red Ogre Review, 2023).