Captain Kirk's Women

A Poem by Kherry McKay

How a youthful appreciation of Star Trek helped prepare a guy for love.

Captain Kirk’s Women

After reading Billy Collins

Last week, one sought the notice of the captain in a 60’s flower- power blouse with an open neck. Her name was Miri. I can only hope she was unaware of me, the ogling twelve-year-old watching her and the captain in TV syndication. I fell for her hard, even as she revealed a teenage crush on the captain, got hurt, broke out in a blue-green patina, a symptom of love and a deadly ailment on that world.

Before her, Nona—an intriguing name as ever for a “Kanutu” woman —cast a spell while slipping into shimmering-black Lurex bellbottoms; a bracelet the shape of a snake, part of her voodoo. She cured Kirk with a quivering “mahko” root: I stiffened as her lacerated right palm rested on the captain’s chest, the wiggling root making her cry loud incantations. When she finished, she swooned—I almost passed out on my side of the Sylvania. She asked Kirk, “Can you smell this fragrance?” My mother came into the living room to tell me to take out the garbage. “Some,” Nona said, “. . .find it pleasing. . . .”

Leila—a farm girl from Omicron Ceti III who’s blond and seems like she’s from Iowa (but much happier, now that she’s possessed by hallucinatory plants)—has Mr. Spock giggling. Leila met Spock while in tight-gray overalls with shoulder epaulettes and front-zip pants, showing him her planet’s happiness spores. All it took was one spew and now Mr. Spock hangs upside down from a tree as I slide down languorously from the living room sofa. If only loving a girl could be like pollination instead of strange and painful like it is in the seventh grade.

I want Leila badly until I learn of the irresistible teardrops of Elaan of Troyius, who, by crying, makes people her slaves. (Oh, how youths appreciate royalty when it’s adorned in dilithium crystals, looks Nigerian, and brandishes skin through skimpy aluminum!) Elaan wears a haughty expression, but I stop caring as I catch her belly button move under a whisper-weight camisole with a point d’esprit back. A touch of her moisture and I’d be her plaything.

I’d have drunk from her tears if given the chance, but I lack the time for now there’s Deela visiting in the wink of an eye; cynical Deela in a lilac nightdress with no sides who lives her whole life in the blink of a few seconds—making a play for Captain Kirk. I’d better get a move on while she’s in her charmeuse gown with low backline and sweetheart trim. The captain might be hers before he can say “beam me up.” (Darn, part of the scene is missing. Now Kirk's re-donning his boots; they didn’t show the good part!) Deela can secrete all the Scalosian serum into my morning orange juice that she wants, as long as keeps me home from school. Slowly, in real time, she’ll pull off a scalloped shirt with its elastic, gloss shirring and incandescent clasps and force me to become her latest wink.

I’d have settled for a life of microseconds with Deela, but today there appeared Lieutenant Moreau on an alternate Enterprise with more midriff showing than Brittany Spears, who’s not yet born, will imagine after she is. Long flowing hair and a twist in her gauzy metallic peignor. Moreau’s little finger pushes a clear plastic button that makes a bad Kirk’s enemies disappear; what I think of—adjusting my blue jeans in another direction—is how she might help me thin out the junior high male gene pool, A.K.A. the competition. I wish I had a woman like that to get me through Civics!

Moreau is accustomed to being the “captain’s woman,” but the captain won’t want her by next week. She'll call me captain then, as she comes to my house to meet my parents, saying, “I have to take your son to Rigel 12. He’s too handsome and mature for puny Earth!” She’ll lie down on my robot-festooned spread, beckoning me with her come hither, Star Trek stare: a look casting directors perennially, up and down, search the galaxy for.

Epilogue

The years passed. I’m grown up—or rather I’m supposed to be. I scan for intelligent femmes who’ll leave the security of Earth behind, shove off with me in my Enterprise Explorer car rental; enter the parts of my psyche that no one has gone before. Thank you, Captain James T. Kirk and all your beautiful space babes, for lending my imagination manageable, tender introductions to love. The distance between a man’s and a boy’s sex life isn’t measured in parsecs or in light-years. It’s measured by the libido’s fears, by a beauty that doesn’t need a telescope to be seen, to start a kid to judder.

I love every woman more for Kirk’s having put the alien in them, making a few blush with pride at my adolescent hubris: my small member that wanted, one day with me, to conquer the galaxy for the sweetest one. She’ll be the prettiest to me, the gal with a phaser near her heart; the one who won’t giggle when I conjure up “mahko” roots, a few interesting costumes, or the tears of Troyius.