Size / / /

you tread on dead wood,
your face awash with moonlight
bent down by the soft grey clouds.

you feel music and a scene
where two lovers commingle
breaths in abject tenderness.

i tell you i think you are my answer
to the terror of being alone
in a graveyard of buried stars,

its every dead-ash sun a crumbled cipher
to a universe that gave birth to itself
to answer the very questions i make of you.

i tell you i can look in the green iris pools
of your eyes and not hear blood in my ears;
i hear atoms falling together and falling apart,

and i am so afraid that between our bodies
lies only warped and empty space --
a coldness where nothing moves,

where all are caught in isolate crystal,
an eternity of nothing stirring --
no photon bursts, no hand brushing a face.

i move towards you,
and my mouth makes the shape
of unanswerable desperation.

you ask about constellations,
pointing to a star you think i named
for you -- it still burns, you say,

and elsewhere, they all burn.
i hold my questions in my mouth,
i press my hand to your warm face.

 

Copyright © 2002 Emily Gaskin

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Emily Gaskin currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where perpetually cloudy skies conspire to keep her from ever enjoying use of her new telescope. She has poetry forthcoming in Star*Line, Moxie, and the Dreams of Decadence anthology. For more about her, visit her Web site.



Bio to come.
Current Issue
4 Nov 2024

“Did you know,” the witch says, “that a witch has no heart of her own?”
Outsiders, Off-worlders {how quickly one carves out a corner of the cosmos, / claims a singular celestial body as [o u r s] in the scope of infinity}
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Issue 21 Oct 2024
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Podcast read by: Devin Martin
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Issue 7 Oct 2024
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Issue 23 Sep 2024
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Art by: nino
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Issue 26 Aug 2024
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