Engagement: Set in Stone
Lauren McBride
He once romanced me
with a candlelit dinner
and stroll under three alien moons
where the nights last thirty hours.
We saw others from our world
and many races new to us.
For our one-year-together anniversary,
he suggested flowers,
and bought tickets to a world
viewed only from a portal-room.
Under crystal clear skies,
glass leaves on viscous stems
bent in warm breezes
and flower petals shattered
into rainbows where they fell.
Today, while touring
a gas giant
he proposed
above a lake
of liquid diamond
lit by strobe-lightning.
Inside a claw-armed
atmo-skimmer, we fly
among diamonds suspended
in the sky where they form, until
too heavy, they fall like rain.
“Choose one,” he says.
First published in Dreams and Nightmares 103, May 2016
