Transmission #51 - Induration

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I see red oxide through a blur
of tears. No, not sad – excited.
The wind on Mars is gentle,
but something is in it that
we haven’t identified yet,
an irritant. The dust gets in.
I say we, but I’m out here
alone. There’s a filter on
the faceplate to compensate
for pink light that suffuses
the landscape. Almost like
home. If home were a desert.
Someday, they say, we’ll plant
this world with more than
microbes digesting minerals,
more than our emitted waste,
more than corpses of our dead
curled beneath basalt cairns.
From space, the maculate surface
is a volcanic language, glossed
with impact and oxidation,
a palimpsest of stains, eroded
by wind and ice into shadow-
colors, waves of rippling dunes.
We trek out onto the surface
in rotation: seeding, sampling,
refuse disposal. Some of us,
prematurely disenchanted, say
they’d just as soon stay safe
inside these domes forever.
I take their extra outside shifts.
We all were given permanent
contraceptive implants before
the mission began, and yet …
I’ve told no one. Out here, far
from the domes, I lift my mask.
It’s a race between prokaryotes
we’re testing to see which best
degrade toxic perchlorates
in the regolith. Which ones are
good enough to make the team.
Toughen up, I whisper,
remembering dodgeball days
of grade-school recess, who
got picked on, who was cut out.
If you survive a childhood
of cruelties, you can survive
anything, I tell my unborn son.