Your face as big as the moon.
Eclipses me. Tea-stained, golden-leafed.
Are we singing or kissing?
You pluck planets from their sockets,
their cozy orbital pockets.
When I ask what you’ll do with them
you say you mean what have I done.
We are muscle & callous, cell swirl & follicle.
We are mostly meat. Mostly water. Mostly nervous
system stringing to the stars & back.
Mostly microbes—viruses, bacteria, mites.
Which creatures inside me recall
my grandmother’s voice. Which ones guide
my hand toward the bottle.
Which ones led me to you, sister-city
building bridges, paving roads, trading citizens.
You are the people passing by my gate.
The people swinging it open & coming inside.
You are riverbottom, cobra-strike, dinosaur bones.
I am skyscraper & celery seed.
Somewhere inside us, houses glow
in the pink shadows. The planets now
all faces in the windows, watching us
tell stories about who we were
when we were only villages.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 5.
Elizabeth Vignali is the author of the poetry collection House of the Silverfish (Unsolicited Press 2021) and three chapbooks, the most recent of which is Endangered [Animal] (Floating Bridge Press 2019). Her work has appeared in Willow Springs, Cincinnati Review, Poetry Northwest, Mid-American Review, Tinderbox, The Literary Review, and others. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she produces the Bellingham Kitchen Session reading series and serves as poetry editor of Sweet Tree Review.
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