Holes
by Oliver Smith
She is planet-bound, thirsting
against the gravity well,
hungry for other worlds.
The air intake of a wind tunnel huffs
among the abandoned airframes,
like a broken mind, a lonely
starship crying for her pilot.
The dead machines stay silent—hollow faces
of newly inanimate silicon and steel
frozen in thousand-framed poses on stages
of papier-mâché, two by one, plaster, and tinfoil.
An actress in silver rises from the corpse of the future;
Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted. She rolls across
the endless green-baize runways, dodging
brambles and fissures. She might remain
immaculate while others fade and rot
beneath their bricks and small ambitions.
The unforgotten light of abandoned spaces;
concrete and obsolete hardware green with moss
all grown with lichen as if they were fallen
logs among the briars.
She could stretch out her hand and pluck
a star from the faux-velvet sky; its circuits
shedding shards of shattered fire
as she crushes it down
to a point of infinite density.
Oliver Smith is a visual artist and writer from Cheltenham, UK. He is inspired by Tristan Tzara, J. G. Ballard, and Max Ernst; by the poetry of chance encounters; by frenzied rocks towering above the silent swamp; by unlikely collisions between place and myth and memory. His poetry has been published in Abyss & Apex, Ink, Sweat, and Tears, Strange Horizons, Sylvia Magazine, and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He holds a PhD in Literary and Critical Studies from the University of Gloucestershire.
