The Pockets of a Foreign Moon

We arrived in silence, a small craft of breath, skimming the dim enamel of another world, where the ocean held itself in stone.

In the glassy hollows, water trembled like a voice that had forgotten the body that once carried it, and kept speaking anyway.

I bent close to see my helmet’s reflection split by slow bacteria, luminous as constellations, making a map of places they would never leave.

Behind me, the ship hummed, a soft winter inside steel, and I thought of home as a planet of hands, of tides that touch and withdraw like a promise.