Colonization of Mars:
The gravity of zucchini bread 
and other ways I remember 
our weight on Earth.

Here is a picture of the garden
I grew for us here-- I know it's only
rocks and dust but sometimes you 
have to grow what's left of love--
take shovel to the iron oxide and
dance wakeful for rain--
They told us we would die on
Mars-- not a sudden death--
we'd grow old with the small planet's
disgruntled flushed face-- 
Turn frustrated and dusty like him--
leave foot prints stamped across 
the blushing terrain.
Had I told you how I spent the first days
trying to find
another life form to ask
why Mars was always so restless?
I dug with my hands until
they were bloody in the soil--
There are no zucchini on mars
or other vegetables for that matter
but when I go out for a walk in the 
afternoon I pretend I'm in your garden
again-- the one your father taught you
to make-- you hand me a peach like a fist
and we're tart and green--
These anxious Earth bodies aren't held by
the weight of the air-- 
We're finding ourselves in the same
orbit-- same walks looking for a place
to planet the zucchini--
You see humans weren't made to be so red--
and the face of Earth stares like
the pit of a peach calling for April--
calling to us traitors-- the red people
without gardens or lovers to send postcards to--
Some nights I hover just above my bed
and wonder if you slept better
without me asking you to hold me--
if it wasn't Earth that kept
me tethered but some force that
you kept hidden only in your arms--
it wasn't fair to have made you a planet
but I couldn't help but notice
that there have been few people in my 
life to have made me as heavy as a moon--
and you were one of them--
At the time I signed up for the 
first colony on Mars I had suspected 
we would all die red and war-like anyway
I figured it was worth the change of location--
You told me you loved me once
under the pressure of planets 
dangling by strands of yarn on a clear
night when we sat on the porch 
and we baked a loaf of zucchini bread
from a recipe on the back of a bag of flour--
we sliced it warm and heavy-- gooey
on our fingers without forks--
you know the soil here feels like that bread--
feels like your sticky fresh hands 
and sometimes I even
imagine there is warmth sewn in the Martian dirt.
I didn't tell you I was leaving because 
I knew it would ruin the zucchini bread
and that you wouldn't look out a window 
the same way you open an 
oven to check on the bread before it's done--
tooth-pick fingered and anxious
enough to float out of Earth's April grasp--
Maybe I left so we could feel the pull across
the stretch of space I'm sending this letter
across-- maybe there was never any pull from
a planet or a peach pit and we only
imagined it to help us all stay in love
long enough to bake bread and 
wait on a porch for the planets to 
come out of hiding-- 
When you sleep remember we have two gardens--
one is red and rusting and the other
I hope you still keep. Bake for me
even if it only tastes like gravity.