You planted galaxies inside me when we met
and now they're pouring out of my mouth,
stretching their curled limbs skyward from
the abyss of my stomach; they travel
up and up across the expanse between us
and down your throat like some sort of
invisible (and magnetic) parasite.
One:
Brown eyes remind me of Chernobyl,
but on you,
I see the Wilson Park Ice Skating Rink where
my mother first taught me to skate. I see my
tiny hands wrapped around my first dog, Kelly, and
the Beluga Whales at the Shedd Aquarium
in 1999. There’s a six foot deep hole between us
that makes me wonder if cataracs eclipse your
perception of me like they do for everyone else—
I wonder if you worry about
teetering over the edge
like
I do.
Two:
If I’ve learned anything from math class it’s that
a negative times a negative equals a positive so
I guess it’s a good thing when it comes to you and I, because
how else would two equally bashful people ever work
together in harmony? But then what about science—
positives and negatives attract, so I must
be the latter of the two in this electrical charge
electrical attraction
sparks fly
fires rise
other cliched forms of saying that I just like
when your hands are on my hips and your
lips are on my neck and somewhere
in the back of my mind, I hope to God
that this new age romance is not all for naught.
Three:
I met the devil when I kissed your lips.
God was pushed out when the space between us
shrunk and shrunk until there was not enough
room for air nor biblical commandments nor morality nor logic.
We fell together, tumbling over the clouds like the
awkward first steps of a child, unsure and panicked;
our clipped wings, like birds in captivity, did nothing to
prevent us from ripping the pages of His thick book
and mixing and matching His words—
“burn[ing] with passion,” “two shall become one flesh—”
we folded them into fortune tellers.
Four:
When you first told me that you thought I was beautiful,
I did not believe you. You looked so unsure of yourself—eyes
downcast, bottom lip tucked between your teeth—that I thought,
“How can this this wide-eyed boy think that he can
spot constellations that the Greeks and the Egyptians overlooked?”
Then I realized that the words that spewed from your
blood stained lips were stars of your own creation. Somehow
you compressed and fused your perception of me with
interstellar matter and birthed a new stencil in the sky. You
created a cynosure of me. You look at me like you’re
gazing at Polaris, a perfect doll like Helen or Marilyn;
something I am not.
But I like it.
Five:
We make up Sirius, the Dog Star—
you, the primary, and I, the companion, we are
the brightest in the heavens. Canis Major would
be nothing without us. Circling one another in a far,
spread out pace, we take our time in dissecting
one another’s intentions. You are my horoscope and
I am your zodiac sign; both born in the year of the pig
we display the raw, open wounds of altruism to one another.
I wonder when you look in the mirror,
if the reflection that you see is that of the Milky Way;
the barred spiral that contains
our solar system
our planet
my
home.
If being with you would mean spewing galaxies
from my lips for the rest of my days, I would
gladly regurgitate a whole new universe
just to hold your hand.
about a boy