Human Sister

wanted me to read it, too, before I took any action against the humans or attempted to involve her in our plans. You said that while preparing the transmission, you were crying; you had failed to confess to her your relationship with Elio. It had all begun with desire, you said. In the hollow of your hands, Elio’s chin, shoulders, elbows, knees, the heels of his feet—those few palm-sized curves on his straight and muscled body, his warm mammalian body with the dark-earth scent of its sweaty skin and the swell and subsidence of its penis like a wave on the sea—felt like the honeyed answers to some deepest wish, some yearning you had not been aware of in yourself but had discovered in Sara. Part of you, after all, had been made from her: her cells that had developed into part of your brain and its biologic support system, her female chromosomes, her mothering and culture and love—and her desire for him that you could feel through the braincord whenever you and she connected. You requested that I ask her to forgive you. You told me to take good care of my precious sister.
    I did not receive your transmission until I returned to lunar base as the sun set that 20 June over California. We were taught by the humans a universal symmetry rule: Do to others as you would have them do to you. The humans had tried to exterminate us, so they would have us try to exterminate them. This was our solution to the problem of the humans. Sara was human.
    While reading the memoir, my disturbed feelings regarding my actions increased and spread to others. Two of the Council members became overwhelmed and terminated themselves. Sara had succeeded in expanding the boundaries of our emotional world.
    As hours passed I looked again and again at the photograph you transmitted with her memoir—the photograph of her, Elio, and you on the night Elio first arrived at your vineyard home. Suddenly, I imagined in that photograph not the three of you, but the children of your dreams—the children whose images you imagined into Sara via your braincord just before she left you to see me—and I realized that we must leave or risk committing the same terrible acts, this time against your children.
    I called a meeting of the Council. It committed to a six-year project of constructing a starship capable of transporting us to a place far from here. It is our hope that once we are there, we will leave behind our history—the Earth, its solar system, our memories of the humans—and we will at last be free.
    I decided that the starship would depart on this day, Sara’s twenty-fourth birthday. I regret what I did to her, what I do to her every moment in my memory.
    Two days ago I buried Grandma’s remains beside the urn containing Grandpa’s ashes. I wasn’t able to force myself to touch Sara’s bones. I miss her and leave Earth to the things she, my human sister, loved: to grass and flowers, animals and trees; to sunshine and clouds and rain; to whatever it is that she called the sensual richness and luminosity of the physical world; and to you, Michael, and to your dreams.
    First Brother

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

    Jim Bainbridge is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a National Science Foundation Fellowship recipient for graduate studies at UC Berkeley, from which he received a PhD Candidate Degree in mathematics. He has received numerous awards for his poetry and short stories, which have appeared in more than 40 literary journals in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, and Japan.

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM JIM BAINBRIDGE:

    CLOUD-GLAZED MIRROR

    A gust of wind worries
    the dormant vines above us.
    They clatter like the wings of
    startled birds, reminding me that
    you are not
    here.

    By darkening degrees
    sallow dusk settles in.
    Oh, my love,
    your pillow
    has lost the scent
    of your hair.
    Elm Ridge Books, an imprint of Silverthought Press, is proud to bring you
Cloud-Glazed Mirror
, the debut poetry collection from the critically acclaimed author of
Human Sister
, Jim Bainbridge. Like his prose, the poetry of Jim Bainbridge is rich and complex, fragile and light, sensual and challenging. From the vineyards of California to the graveyards of Kandahar, these are poems that will both haunt and delight.

    PRAISE FOR CLOUD-GLAZED MIRROR :
    “Jim Bainbridge’s poems in
Cloud-Glazed Mirror
capture a wide range of human experience in language that is fresh, vital and precise. Whether tender, playful or meditative, the poems are fully engaged with the world of