1. ready

“Beam me up, baby,” he says and she laughs, their fingers knotted together under the spotlight. His knuckles remind her of kneading bread. In the play, he’s a social worker who gets abducted by aliens. By the end he’s returned back to earth, but he’s fallen in love with a beautiful alien woman and can’t stand to be apart from her, so he builds his own spaceship using alien knowledge. His wife presses the button to send him back up.

At home, he takes off his makeup and pours 1 tsp active dry yeast into a glass mixing bowl. She’s asked before if he wants a bread maker, so they can press the button together and wait for the machine to ding, but he prefers the feeling of dough beneath his hands.

He spends two hours on the treadmill every day to be ready for liftoff, dehydrates himself before every show. He taxis to the show earlier than her, because all the makeup means he needs extra time to get ready. She stands in the doorway like a dog, watching him go. Then she pisses and cuts herself another slice of bread. It’s overproved.

Next line: I’ll be here
when you come back for me, so
tell me how it goes.

2. set

In the play, he’s given silver rings around both wrists, embedded deep in the skin. He’s lying on top of a white tablecloth, arms at his sides and legs glued stiffly together. Red meat: bloody.

The alien woman leans over him, blocking the ceiling lights. He realizes, here and now, that he’s been betrayed. He’s not being transformed into an alien like they told him—he’s being sent home. He starts to struggle against the bonds, sending shocks of pain through his arms. I can’t go back, he thinks. Back to the backyard and to his wife. Back to an Earth with stale bread and no water and nowhere, nowhere to run. An Earth without her.

I thought you loved me, he says.

She pouts. The prosthetic molded to her mouth droops. “Don’t think this isn’t up-set-ting for me, too.” She emphasizes every syllable. “I’m gonna miss you really bad, you know. For a while.”

Somewhere, out past the walls, is laughter. A whirring sound begins behind his head. The silver bands around his wrists are tightening, he can feel blood oozing from beneath the edges. She shakes her head and reaches for the button on the wall. “If you come back,” she says, “tell me how it goes.”

Countdown—three, two, one
more minute ways to let him
down, ways to let him

3. go

When she finally goes, she wonders what will happen if she doesn’t make it to the other side. It’s the same feeling as the car in front of you stopping short, as the hum of the runway as the plane waits for liftoff.

She brought up the topic calmly and clearly, on a day in summer while he waited for the loaf to prove. Ripped off the bandage, as it will. It only hurt momentarily, like an ear piercing or a vaccine. A peach pit in her stomach, a brief fear of letting him down—then nothing.

“I don’t think this is working out,” she said, and he agreed.

What does it feel like to be light, even for a moment, even for the briefest second of a second, even for a time so short that it’s really no time and therefore you were never light at all? Nothing, it turns out. You go and you’re there, like closing your eyes and waking up somewhere else—a moment of darkness so short that it was really never dark at all.

There, in the driveway, a spotlight shines down on her. She looks up, squinting. She laughs, twisting her own hands together. Her heart is thumping in her index finger. She calls for him through the open door, shouts for him to press the button. He stands on the threshold, his thumb to his slightly parted lips.

“______________,” she says, and her feet lift off the ground.

Beam me up baby
I’m gone going GO GO GO—
and then [  ] we STOP.

The title of this poem was adapted from “Time Traveler’s Haibun: 1989” by Maureen Thorson.