I don’t want flying cars. I want my language back.

I want to glass-bottom boat my way to a dirt road

 

with no street signs, squeeze myself on the grave

of my restlessness, my atomic self-esteem.

 

Five hundred years and we have finished. What

have burned sugar and dyed cotton blighted?

 

I stain my skin with sunlight, try on those

new underwater lungs, which is to say, I search

 

for new meaning in old salt. Sand dollars are dead,

I discover. I trade them for a tour ride round

 

the mountain. The cyborg guide has a tinny

Guyanese accent, points to a crashed, cracked

 

ship, which several Locals have adorned

with bougainvillea, flags and wooden beads.

 

The guide says, remember when the sky became

red? Look—how the giant stars came to us.

 

Someone beside me regrows their limb. I try,

but I’m stopping myself, and I want to go backward

 

in time immediately. There’s another word

for lost, but I can’t remember.

 

(Editors’ Note: “In Stock Images of the Future, Everything is White” is read by Matt Peters on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, 46B.)

© 2022 Terese Mason Pierre