Three Poems

Red Giant

Before I even realized, the universe had
ruptured. Every cell in your body became a sun
drawing its final breath. Thirty trillion lights
glowed hot through your flower petal skin as if
trying to burn through the lifetime they were
promised. For an instant, you were a red giant
melting bone to flame. An eternity too late,
I thought of your helpless eyes, softened
by regret, and felt your heat sinking
like acid through my ribs.

---

Nonbeliever

On the first day,
the sun died.
Now, on the two hundredth day,
all the lights around me
are fluorescent. Electric bulbs hum
with the memory of a permafrost
corpse; hollow cheekbones, skin

stained chartreuse. I have become
a mayfly, hovering around solar remains
with wings that refract blue and red
like miniature cathedral windows.
I am the nonbelieving

worshipper, waiting
for some eternity that has been promised
to me. I thought I could find it in candles
flickering against the night like prayers—but
the closest I got was in my childhood
bedroom, lying beneath glow-in-the-dark
constellations I once mistook for the sky.
I understand now; I have invented

my own heaven. Like false suns,
even ceiling lights leave a halo
when I close my eyes; all through
my nerves photons sing out
like a choir. I let it be
the sensation of undying.
A sostenuto heartbeat,
steady rhythm of fantasy.

---

Monozygote

Someone once told me
her memory lives on in you—
So tell me how to build a life
from the empty space that devoured
her body when it burned to ash—from dreams
of her that bleed out like a collapsing
heart when morning light stings
at their edges—from the delusions
we mortals invent when we look at the sky, about
perfect reunions above cornsilk clouds—Tell me
sixty years from now I will claw my way
to that fantasy, and she will still recognize me
as cleaved flesh does its mirror—because
someone said so—because hope is a honeyed lie
we throw our whole bodies into to make absence
more tolerable—to blind ourselves to the way time
razes everything we treasure—choking the air
with towers of smoke—leaving our hands empty
and aching—rendering our past weightless—
Go on—
Try and show me the only proof I need to pretend
memory does not slip from my fingers like a child’s breath
is a fading photo strip—or an old birthday
card—or a bouquet of her favorite flowers
decomposing beside a gravestone—as if
the mere idea—the illusion—of her can be
immortal—as if we are not confined to cells
that split and break down like permanently self-
destructing machines—Tell me she still breathes
in the folds of my skin, in the lilt
of my voice, in the two marks under
my right eye—Tell me you see her bones
in place of my skeleton–as if
I can give body to a ghost—as if
I can hold history as kin—as if
I can be somehow whole—Tell me
sheer will can stop her—
from dissolving—