When my ear first orbited your throat
to listen for a roaming balloon of nestled flesh
I heard trailer home hollowness
in copper vein pipes.
You draped a scarf over your superglued
neck, telling me it was normal to fistfight
death at 35.
On Dad’s desk, your weight breathed feebly
inside a sandwich bag. At night
its nuclear green cast Orions across our ceiling.
I never knew what real stars looked like,
while you had completely forgotten.

Years later,
in the dark of our 17-acre home,
you handed me your thyroid in its bag
swimming in opalescent fluid
and you looked at Polaris for the first time,
as that same glow painted the Big Dipper
on neighboring snowbanks.
I dropped the bag on the dry rot porch.
We heard your cancer flatten to a deflated bicycle tire,
sweating from death,
watched through squinted eyes as its glow turned
from hazardous neon to cinder.
It dried in the moonlight,
a forgotten, frostbitten raisin,
and our eyes readjusted to the perpetuating darkness.

I saw it then like a long constellation
line connecting star to forehead.
It had been a lie before,
but the North Star is truly the brightest
in the sky. We looked through its surface
underneath the star’s skin to its heart space,
and we realized that Polaris can only be seen
when thin plastic holds inside
damaged shadows of family
dinners bathed in deionized salt,
where I ponderously stared at the ****
in your esophagus, drawn with knife
like ruby crayon into office paper.