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Perihelion is the closest a comet gets to the fire before managing to escape
1986 apparition was the least
favourable on record the worst
viewing for Earth observers
for the last 2,000 years
Khartoum, 1986. Pressed between man
and concrete balcony, I wait
for promised fireworks. To spark belief
this trapped feeling is flirtation,
I swig arak, the local firewater
that strafes the throat with gasoline.
Iām just a girl who canāt believe sheās here
until his attention sketches me from smoke
to solid. Alcohol mimics fullness,
but drains far too quickly through my punctures.
There.
He smears a finger across the sky, points at a blur
too dim for the name comet.
No. There.
Halley. I thought we had a deal. Youād
stage a perfect flyby, a bells-and-whistles
shawl of flame across the sky, and I would
toe the narrow line of girl-wants-boy. But
youāre playing peekaboo on the wrong
side of the sun, ripping up the book on
stellar etiquette and bending orbit to your
own kinked rules, while Iām trudging a
half-life in the mud of other peopleās
fairy tales. One day my prince will, etc.
I tip back another mouthful, gag, see stars of sorts. Out there,
Halley is trying to get the message through my signal crackle;
remind me how once upon a time
I splashed outside the lines;
didnāt know it was
a mess, and didnāt care. Before
I learned the science of satisfaction
was a man to fill my void with fitting colour.
Frightened of what life is like on other planets,
I hogtied to the safe trajectory of marriage, husband, happy ever.
orbital eccentricity
deviates from a perfect circle irregular shape
Halley orbits the sun in the opposite direction
to the planets
Imaginary lines drawn in the sky.
No straight path through the universe;
not for Halley, not for me. Size of
a moon, and I couldnāt see I was
kissing men to inoculate against
a gravity pulling in the opposite
direction. Running halfway round
the globe to achieve the impossible,
escape velocity from my queer core.
Late for his own perihelion, Halley skirts the thin breath of Mercury;
dodging asteroids, sprinkling meteors like kisses.
A bearded beauty teetering the tightrope,
he is all kinds of unruly. Has had
ten thousand revolutions to
imperfect his bona to vada
your dolly shriek up and
down the back alley
of the solar system,
and I have
just the
one.
its dynamics cha otic
and unpredictable on long timescales
veering from orbit
Tonight or never.
On Halleyās return I will be dust
that sifts the space between worlds.
Can keep shredding myself
with repetition
of what I donāt want,
donāt need; or accept
Iām erratic,
path spiced with deviation.
as Halley approaches the Sun, it expels
jets of sublimating gas from its surface
which knock it off its orbital path
great enough
to significantly alte...
