Let the world come hungry at me.
Let the hours learn the tender curve
of this neck. For so long I’ve wanted
to believe that I’m made of star stuff,
a glittering spigot
funneled from the blue spiraling arms
of our milky way.
I hear
the clap of hands inside my chest.
I swallow. The body
softening against it. Who hasn’t wanted
to climb atop a roof and jump,
prove we too can come back
like the tulips after a bitter winter. A small body
pulled from dark,
a city of animated dust. I believe
sleep is night’s apology for day,
dreams the only respite from dark. I dream
of fog, fog slowing morning minutes.
Another day drained. Still,
there has only ever been one setting sun,
one rotating light chasing one unreachable
horizon
for billions of years.
A small good miracle,
were I swallowed into a black hole
I could live without shadow. I could live
inside that sunless system of tunnels.
I would be fine
dying there. And still, there is the question:
More god or less?
Me, I could go either way.
I have been told
that nearly all the atoms in the oxygen
we breathe
and the carbon in our skin
fell from the hydrogen furnace of a star,
which makes us less star stuff and more
nuclear waste,
weeds in a field of buttercups.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 22, Issue 1.
Kristene Kaye Brown is a mental health social worker. She earned her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has previously been published, or is forthcoming, in DIAGRAM, Harpur Palate, Minnesota Review, Nashville Review, and others. Kristene lives and works in Kansas City.
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