Don't look at me. Believe it or not, I didn't give birth to this. Like all violence, it came bursting, fully formed, right out of a man's chest. I'm just trying to clean up the mess. Endurance. That's what my mother always told me: it's not just the name of a ship. She sank in the Weddell Sea, not my mother, of course, just that particular ship. Well, froze, maybe; packed in so tightly the hull crushed under the pressure. Sometimes I worry about it: the pressure. The pressure to save everyone; the ship; Jones. I fucking love that cat. Let's blow it up, Parker said, and I agreed. But don't forget about the cat. What harm can there be in saving what's left of us? What if we're not the perfect organism? I thought I was perfect, once. I was naked and cold and dreaming. The dream went like this: there was a valley, just west of Springdale, where the grass just didn't quite feel right. I couldn't stop running my hands through it. In the sky, the Nostromo would appear and disappear at random. Silly bosun. It spelled a sound in the sky. It seemed to blink out of existence so easily. It fell and fell and landed in my open mouth, as if it had something to say; like it was just trying to come home again.

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This piece is part of a larger project responding to films. Specifically (at least at this moment), films where people are lost or on their own (in poems, no one can hear you scream). I'm working on the project with my friend Khaleel Gheba. Normally, the process has been to have a long discussion about a film or variety of films, go back and watch them on our own, and then send poems back and forth. We end up responding to whatever genre or franchise the other has sent using a different film that's somehow interconnected. See also [Khaleel's Aliens poem in this issue].

It began, in many ways, as a method of avoiding "real work." It became, in turn, the project we were most interested in doing real work on.