Andromeda when you were just a girl i marched you through the stars and in so doing, sealed your fate between them, two inches of glass between you and oblivion. as you grew your back straightened, shoulders squared, your eyes hardened to gunmetal and my princess became a dreadnought. i carved that smile into your face, so terrible and beautiful to make men tremble and my genetics turned your bones to stone. when you were barely a woman i pushed you into the stars where you died your first death admist corpses who had given up before you. you came back from the fire a monument to sacrifice, made of molten bones, bent but unbroken. i was there in every pair of hands that pinned those honours to your skeleton i was there, my hope, my pride, in every tremor through phantom fingertips that welded metal stars to your bullet scars. my girl the warship, i thought, my girl the un-sunken. when i was an old woman i lost you to the stars. you breathed in oblivion and smiled that wretched smile, knife-carved and cracking, left me the proud mother of a collapsing sun reaching through the glass for a hand you never asked me to take and grasping nothing but stardust.