He doesn’t have a baby. It’s awkward.
He talks into an out-moded flip phone
which he holds in front of his mouth
the way people used to do when we thought
mobile phone signal gave you brain cancer.
A baby gargles. Kirk leans towards the mother.
“I think that’s Klingon for
TODAY IS A GOOD DAY TO DIE,”
he says helpfully.
The mother must be a Vulcan. She seems unimpressed.
He can’t cross his legs properly in the tight lycra uniform
and he doesn’t know any of the words to ‘Wind the Bobbin Up’
but he makes the tea without complaint
after that first day when he’d asked why
they didn’t just get one of the yeomen to do it
and they made him write an apology letter to Janice Rand.
Sometimes the children cry, and there’s nothing he can do to stop it.
Sometimes they won’t eat, and the mothers let loose
the words ‘failure to thrive’ like a bank of phaser fire.
Kirk learns helplessness. He finds himself
waking at night in the red light of his Captain’s quarters
as if there’s someone crying for him.
He comes red-eyed to the group and his weariness is
mirrored in the women’s faces:
worry lines, sagging gut, greying hair, inability
to cope.
They talk a lot about childbirth. More than one woman
is still bleeding. Kirk can’t quite keep
the horrified expression from his face
and he’s not sure if he wants to call Bones
or his mom, Winona, and tell her
he’s sorry for every scar he’s ever given her.
He tries to help out with the kids
but he’s lightyears out of his depth.
On more than one occasion he contemplates the legality
of using a phaser set to a mild stun
on a toddler who won’t sleep.
In the end he’s asked to leave when one of the babies’ first words is
KHAAAAAAAANNN!
He takes it well. More than anyone,
Kirk knows things are tough on life’s frontiers,
where if you’re going to go you might as well go boldly,
these places where no man.
Captain Kirk visits Edinburgh in August
Rachel Plummer
He beams himself up
town to where it’s busiest.
The people of this planet like to congregate
in places of religious significance,
such as bus stops, overpriced kebab shops,
or around a man dressed like Yoda.
He notes it all down in his log.
Visits a hydroponics facility
known as “The Meadows”
which grows students from seed
in some hidden glasshouse.
Upon maturity, the students
are each given a single disposable barbecue
and transplanted carefully outdoors
on the first warm days of summer.
It’s lonely being an away-team of one
in a city so crowded.
Kirk registers for a poetry slam
under the name Tiberius,
though he can feel the old Directive
primed to take him out.
He recites some of the secret queer
love poetry he’s been working on.
A lot of things rhyme with Spock.
He doesn’t win
and one of the judges tells him
he needs to work on his poet-voice
which is “stilted” and “a bit too Shatner.”
This planet doesn’t deserve him.
He reminds himself that he could obliterate the entire city
with one well timed photon torpedo
and considers this option more seriously
after seeing his third political stand up show
and an experimental play about how smart phones are bad.
The people of this planet ebb and wane
like tides through nightful streets where light
is rockpooled under streetlamps
and each one of them is alien.
Kirk doesn’t know how to phrase this for his report.
He goes back to the two-bed airbnb he’s sharing with five other people
and thinks of his time at the Academy -
the dorms, the impossible tests, the performative nature of it all,
how for every ten of them trying to make it
only one would succeed.
He writes “Captain’s Log, Stardate 2019. I’ve been. I’ve seen
the Fringe and all it has to show, the shows, the blows, the highs and lows
and this is what I’ve come to know:
Whatever you’re looking for, it’s not here. Three stars.”
Rachel Plummer is a poet, storyteller, keen knitter and former student of nuclear astrophysics. They are a New Writers Award recipient and their latest book, Wain, is a collection of poems retelling Scottish myths and folklore from an LGBT+ perspective.