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.
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