Poetry and sci-fi are rebellious siblings: divisive and radical. At the end of September, I attended an event featuring Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, who described poetry as a fragment. Creating a story requires context, but a poet must spin a web without an attic’s rafters. In this process, a writer contradictorily has space to broach topics too difficult to do with a longform medium like essays.
Science fiction is often fleshed out, trading brevity for radical metaphor and spaceships. However, in the world of 90s television production, there is no time for expansive. The X-Files shot 6 days a week, often for 12-14 hours a day. Besides being unimaginably difficult for cast and crew, this schedule required details to be dropped. Fans and casual viewers alike have complained about lack of continuity and unfinished endings among the cinematic shots and innovative, yet often referential, plots.
However, the fragmentation of the episodes creates a space that X-Philes (a fan moniker used from at least as far back as early internet forums) have used to create fanfiction, fanart, and an incredible variety of media. As silly as it may sound, when I find collage screensavers from 1999, I feel the desire to make them proud in the same way I do with my aunts. When I read a reddit post from a teen creating Mulder and Scully fanfiction and asking about the meaning of MSR (Mulder Scully romance), I am honored to see this digital cultural lore passed on to them as it was to me.
Honoring the art of sci fi out of context, I’ve been working on a poetry chapbook that combines X-Files episodes with my own exploration of identity and trauma. I want to share some of this process as I edit it here, so below you’ll find a bit of the introduction, followed by a couple of poems that are closer to finished. I hope it brings you a story from a fragment, and if you have any poetry/writing you’d like to share, I’d love to read it.
I am the Black queer crazy creature you fear in the night. I evade space, time, and detection. I am as quick as a sound on the wind. I am a light in the sky moving unlike any spacecraft. I cannot extricate myself from the world that raised me, so I can also see through the eyes of mulder and scully, flashlight beams drifting into x’s through the night.
—
Detour
I’m a front seat passenger
I am a trunk driver
I am deep within the bowels of
My Toyota’s guts and they
Warn me of the bridge collapse
I dream i can’t push the brake pedal
And slowly meet metal to metal
And when i wake up my eyes
Are red and glowing
I sing myself to sleep in forests
Wrestling with my innate fear of
The canopy of trees
Cloud cover
I’ve never liked not seeing the sky
I don’t want to be invisible to the sun
I want my bones to rattle in their flesh
So surveyors stop their hard day’s work
And glance between the branches
And hear a soft whisper
No one will find you
Pilot
When mulder and scully met a red thread
Wrapped around their necks
And the belt of her robe became
A connecting vein in a dark motel
Blood pulsing around implants
When mulder and scully met a telephone pole
Fell near spray paint on a highway
Hastily done in an X to mark the spot
And fingers pushed up glasses
To look at projector slides
When mulder and scully met the rain
Poured so thoroughly they missed
The north star guiding them
To the most recent abduction
And its enabler threatened them
When mulder and scully met a motel
Burned from their hubris
And the implant found in
An ape’s nose haunted them
Each time their hands gently brushed