Captain Kirk visits Edinburgh in August

Rachel Plummer

Captain Kirk visits Edinburgh in August

He beams himself up
town to where it’s busiest.
The people of this planet like to congregate
in places of religious significance
such as bus stops, overpriced kebab shops,
or around a man dressed like Yoda. 

He notes it all down in his log.

Visits a hydroponics facility
known as “The Meadows”
which grows students from seed
in some hidden glasshouse.
Upon maturity, the students
are each given a single disposable barbecue
and transplanted carefully outdoors
on the first warm day of summer.

It’s lonely being an away-team of one
in a city so crowded.

Kirk registers for a poetry slam under the name Tiberius,
though he can feel the old Directive
primed to take him out.
He recites some of the secret queer love
poetry he’s been working on.
A lot of things rhyme with Spock.

He doesn’t win
and one of the judges tells him
he needs to work on his poet-voice
which is “stilted” and “a bit too Shatner.”

This planet doesn’t deserve him.

He reminds himself that he could obliterate the entire city
with one well timed photon torpedo

and considers this option more seriously
after seeing his third political stand up show
and an experimental play about how smartphones are bad.

The people of this planet ebb and wane
like tides through nightful streets where light
is rockpooled under streetlamps
and each one of them is alien.

Kirk doesn’t know how to phrase this for his report.

He goes back to the two-bed airbnb he’s sharing with five other people
and thinks of his time at the Academy - 
the dorms, the impossible tests, the performative nature of it all,
how for every ten of them trying to make it
only one would succeed.

He writes Captain’s Log, Stardate 23.16. I’ve been. I’ve seen
the Fringe and all it has to show: the shows, the blows, the highs and lows
and this is what I’ve come to know:

Whatever you’re looking for, it’s not here.

Three stars ***



Rachel Plummer is a recipient of the Scottish Book Trust’s New Writers Award for poetry, and has had work published in a range of journals and anthologies.

Their first book, Wain, is a collection of LGBTQ+ retellings of Scottish folklore. Their latest poetry collection, Once I Carried Three Crows, is published by Tapsalteerie.

Rachel lives in Edinburgh with their two children, three guinea pigs, and entirely too many books.

First published in Shoreline of Infinity 16