the kindling

for anon, who requested--humans have lights in their skin (kind of like fireflies) and they look a bit like the stars in the night sky

They call it the Kindling, when the faint sheen of prepubescence catches alight, and burns with all the brightness of adulthood. Girls of thirteen stand around bathroom mirrors, examining their faces for bright spots, looking for stray molecular clouds in their nail beds. At seventeen, the boys' voices crack, and their skin flickers on/off like broken neon signs. All of them are in love with the astrophysics teacher, whose stellar wind sends flickers of light across the lab tables.

Late at night, they lie in bed tracing the spiral arms of their evolving galaxies, and dream dry dreams of neutron star collisions hotter than blue hypergiants.

You are in love, they say, when you find the person whose constellations fit with yours.

.

It's said that you are what happens when stars dream of people and get it wrong--too much phosphorus and not enough fear of death, pulsar instead of pulse. They left out uncertainty, not knowing what it was; the softer shades of melancholy and the gentler warmths. But they get the shape right, the brighthot of love. They get that right too.

Stars dream in metaphors of flesh, and give their dreaming taste buds for sulfur, fingers at the ends of spiral arms. You will drink liquid helium from a cracked Dewar flask, watching the brightness of your skin redouble--relearn arithmetic in parallax, counting parsecs between the Cygnus on your lover's hip and the Cetus over their breastbone. When you first feel your child's protoplanetary disc differentiate, you will cry steam tears. This is how stars dream themselves into human skin.

And this is how stars die--by eating away at themselves until only the shell is left, or scoring the darkness with their final breath, a blast bright enough to outshine a galaxy.

(...they get that right too.)

a curse

burn ibis feathers
the tongues of starlings
wash down with soured vinegar,
wet ashes.
help me to salt the earth,
[side by side beneath a bruising sky,
we will spill salt, sow sorrow—
touch my rimed hands,
say, you have swallowed the sea]
dig this grave with me, again and again,
until i am satisfied. then
shoot me.
fill the grave we dug together
with my body, the
broken wings of larks.

wander on alone, hands full of salt.

a charm

i wear your heartstrings in a lover’s knot
around my wrist—pulse point to pulse,
flesh and its answer.
[this is wrecked devotion, the savage face
of desire. venus smiles, sphinx-like,
hiding the blood in her teeth
the philter in her palm. nike hails her.]
i tore up the slope of your spine, planted green willow.

your heartstrings bleed.

leviathan

God made them with their mouths open,
no milk teeth; loosed them on the teeming world
and said Do not eat to the wrong children,
the one whose bones snapped like dry grass,
whose blood tasted of the sea. So they ate
of the flesh, drank the blood, and had eternal life.
And when they turned back to their Father and smiled,
with all those teeth he gave
to fill their open mouths—

God cursed them for being hungry.

to the god-queen

My black-eyed fire, the knives in the kitchen
are singing for blood, her brother whispers, his mouth hot
against her godhead. They are champagne-slicked,
drunk on adulation; his skin tastes of bloodiron
and he calls her by the secret names stars sing
to their sisters. She lets her head fall back, inverts the world.
(what else is a crown for?)
Above, her city flames, an electric asterism falling
into the dark-dappled sky. Ad astra per urbem, the one
truth she shares with the rat-messiah whose followers burn
her effigy, tongues forked and still bloody from the scalpel.
This is how the false god dies, he tells them, in flesh and fire.
He is not wrong. But she is a fixed star, and her throne
will not be upended with Cassiopeia's--
hers are the spires of cathedrals, the cool marble pillars,
the cold blaze of immortality that goes forth
before all of astral blood--
burning, burning, burning.

advice for girls in labyrinths

this is the part of the story no one mentions—
you’ll have trouble telling them apart

that sometimes theseus wears horns,
and dionysus laughs with an athenian mouth;
even swaddled in the valleys of naxos 
you’ll dream of being back in the minotaur’s arms,
the musk of him, the way you were his world
entire. how’s a girl supposed to choose,
when the man asking is fair as a god,
and monstrous?

who rescues who?
who’s supposed to do the leaving?

(you. it’s always you.
check none of the above and stitch your clothes
with that golden thread—
make every path lead back to you.

…I’m sorry, whose story did you think this was?)

Chrysopoetics

I. the world ends softly—
systole, then
the sudden absence of answer.

II. the sky burns in pieces—Beijing first,
then Bangkok. The news is full
of men and women in surgical masks,
suitcoats rimed ash-white.
Children are being kept inside, it informs,
but you catch round faces at the edge
of camera frames, small noses pressed
against windows.

(how to explain Armageddon
to those little grigori, wide-eyed and guiltless?)

your town gets hit between Nashville
and Kansas City, a few chill-sharp hours
before dawn. you stand in the gathering white,
death dusting your eyelashes.

it’s getting harder to breathe.

on the subject of long distance

the flesh of you is inconvenient—
not beneath my fingers, or my mouth;
too far for even fingertips to reach,
straining. you are a theoretical exercise,
galatea without even stone, and yet—

you are beautiful and live in a house,
far away. I stand at my kitchen sink,
thinking of that place, yet uncharted,
where I would press my lips. you call
my name.
as though the ghost of me
needed reminding.

330 BC

it was so simple then—the universe moved in perfect circles,
and we were the fixed point of divine isometries. how aristotle’s voice
must have trembled when he explained
that bodies reached for one another because
we are all earth, tending toward ourselves.
(and we have never truly forgotten,
recovered)

stars & blood & earth

I cannot take back the way your lip split
against my incisor, the taste
of unearthed copper. I was greedy,
I know. I wanted the parts of you
that were once
among the most luminous stars
the way this was once a love poem.

they made people different in the dark ages--pale as martyrs, long-fingered hands folded in prayer or turned up, stigmatic blood collecting in their palms. Their necks are always craning, bodies unnaturally posed, as though looking up or bending down were not humanity's natural states.

--a different species, wearing colors brighter than we know--richer blues, headier greens. The medieval mind was a thing of interlaced vines and celtic knots, holy days writ in red--the world was a circle unraveling, the liturgical calender turning and turning until it would be anno domini iterum, in saecula saeculorum. amen.

everything was germanic forest and blank spaces on the map, miracles and monsters embedded in the skein of the world. (how else is god to show his power?) all is ordered, and aristotle's spheres are fixed tending towards the center--the earth, the heart.

there are angels with illuminated wings at the edges of the manuscript, their heads bent together, whispering about dragons and the Kingdom on the next page.

the perils of loving a snow queen

You will kiss other women
honeyed-mouthed women, with
pulses like summer thunder and skin
warm as fields lying fallow. But apple-sweet
love fades, and

they will call you cold. You laugh,
already thinking of the first frost, that shard
of mirror she placed on your tongue
(it is lodged somewhere in your throat,
every breath mercuric, poisoned)

the first cold snap finds you barefoot
at the edge of forest. Waiting.

the oracle of delphi writes fortune cookies

I.
This year will bring you cottonwood leaves
fluttering like ash from listing trunks, blight licking
the edges brown. Somewhere Daphne sleeps
in heedless photosynthestate, Apollo having forgotten
where he buried her, which cage of roots cradles
the bow of her ribs. She dreams in xylem, of drinking from
the slagheap seeping below the county’s tanned hide—
rotted gods and the bones of birds, things with teeth that once
cast manticorean shadows. All those layers of Troy,
still smelling of the pyre.

a funeral march for the passing of gods

        We are digging a grave in the Iowa sky,
somewhere between the thunderhead and the flat line of the horizon.
It is ample to lie there, among the hagiographies
already interred in that stellate churchyard, old gods like cornflowers
pressed between the pages.

(a girl in the house plays with the serpents as they shed their skins,
unwinding from the caduceus and into her hands. She craves
pomegranates, then apples, uncertain
as to which maiden she is playing)

psyche/eros

there’s a god in the dark and he’s got a hand between your thighs,
the snare of his teeth around a breath, as though it might stir
the dry and moveless air of temples. He calls you Leda
sometimes, or Danae, Europa—Ganymede, when he is drunk—
it runs in the family, you think, but then

what accounts for the sweetness of human beings, that wild
self-directed longing that makes even divinity
kneel, and press its ear to our chests, trying to hear
some note half-forgotten, a yes so brief. Or maybe

the sound of the sea in that cavernous space, tumultuous
breathless; waves coming and going on the lure of an eye,
a lip. Being so caught up,
                                      in the press of his fingers that you
forget shrine and grove and oracle, the pale poet, dreaming;
you are threaded through his mouth, and every time he opens it
your name will come spilling out with the lamp-light.