
When I plop the universe down like a freshwater catch onto my kitchen counter, I shimmy in an engine piston now driving an expanding cylinder: the host to glass galaxies, cast-iron planets, lead marrow babies born screaming in super-Earth saloons. Back in the cosmic frontier, our ancestors shot spaceward long before I busted and barreled into an exomoon coal town with a forgotten name.
Watch a push of reptilian miners slither onto the company boxcar for the journey home to their sons and daughters hungry under oxygen-thin blankets. Watch these workers wipe away soot from their scaled faces as they blink in vivid vision through the unveiling of lips checks and eyes all fused to family selves shining like a supernova — wait no —
like a Manhattan businessman, soaking from a midtown shower, he kisses his wife and peels away the skin of his suit a basketful of births after George Washington stands on the island of many hills to marry Martha and later reads aloud The Declaration of Independence before a 1776 crowd.
In a winter-slap darkness, patriots melt down a statue of King George III into 42,000 musket balls. Quick quick open your windows to hear our Brooklyn boys cracking gunpowder fire near The Red Lion Inn, red like Betelgeuse’s solar headlight speeding through the steel-jointed dimensions of my steampunked universe.