Stranger at a party
despairing small-talk of weather.
“How dull,” he declares.
A drink droplet crawls your knuckles
like how, “It rains diamonds on Neptune,”
you say. The music is unbearable.
You wear an earbud tuned to radio
static of lightning strikes on Saturn
washing out background radiation pick-up lines.
Sweaty alien hand on your shoulder,
chatter in cometary Rosetta snow.
Slurry voice, can’t help myself
rover breath like rusted wind.
God, this is becoming
one of those affairs that won’t end,
frozen time, a sundial on Mercury.
Couples twitch to the beat around you.
What rain dances will you perform
in other gravities, on worlds without surfaces,
what gods will you decide not to believe in there?
Calm center of writhing bodies, in the eye
of someone across the crowd cloud-
bursting your breath before it leaves your lips.
You’re as defenseless before her as
cold blood in a meteor shower,
washed in fire over and over. Orbiting
each other as foreign orreries
full of your own little lust storms.
Magnetically meeting again and again
eyes with sunspot pupils.
There are plenty of stars in the sea,
but not even the Great Red Spot
is gonna last forever—
only got another 20 years left in it, max,
so again and again your tides
like Jovian moons turning all liquid inside.
Of course your profile says long walks on the beach
The only place where there isn’t weather
is at the Ocean of Storms.
Lie on the sand there, and be still.
| Josh Pearce has had more than 100 stories and poems published in a wide variety of magazines, including in Analog, Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Bourbon Penn, Cast of Wonders, Clarkesworld, Diabolical Plots, Interzone, Nature, On Spec, Weird Horror, and elsewhere. He also reviews films for Locus Magazine. Find more of his writing at fictionaljosh.com. One time, Ken Jennings signed his chest. |  |