Stargazing at Noon

by Amanda Torroni

  hold your doomsday baton

  conduct the insects

  a cacophony of crickets

  and winged instruments

  crescendo

  cue the light show above

  a brilliant display of dynamite

  all b o o m and P O P

  barbeque a thousand suns

  the way astronauts describe outer space

  as metallic, sweet-smelling

  as gunpowder and burned steak

  make a metaphor

  how like summer

  we whimper out of existence

  sizzle. singe. evaporate.

  SLOW DRAG

  I.

  The Time Traveler, a native, stands watch over Pack Square,

  dons a military jacket and fingerless gloves. Asheville,

  then and now. Now and then

  he flickers in and out of existence

  smoking unfiltered cigarettes

  writing a poem, “How to Hold a Moment in Your Lungs.”

  II.

  Maybe it’s in our blood: juniper berries, pine needles, acorn.

  Maybe there’s a verse

  for how we found ourselves

  on the forest floor.

  III.

  Mark the elevation

  remark how the world looked a lot smaller

  when you were standing five thousand feet

  above

  it all.

  LET’S TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME

  and slingshot like a comet. Park on the astral overlook. Gaze across the black of space and twinkling string lights. Call this city a galaxy. Talk about life, the universe, and everything. Kiss until the stars go out. Find every excuse to not go home, or back to earth, and stay here in this moment. This one breathless moment. This place where yours and mine converge and these become our lips our limbs our words.

  Let’s colonize the night.

  Here, right here. This could work.

  A LOVE LIKE MINE

  Because your light

  is not quite like mine.

  Your grays are not

  gray like mine.

  But your wants

  could be met in time,

  should you want

  a love like mine.

  DEAR MOM

  I’m thirty years old. Don’t ask me how it happened. I blink and ten years pass. I take a breath and forget. I forget to take a breath.

  I’m thirty years old and what that means is I’ve lived a third of my life without you. What’s a decade? Ten years and two fists and not a fight left in me.

  Perhaps I have become unstuck. In time. In space. In mind.

  Did you ever read Vonnegut? Another question I’ll never get to ask. According to the Tralfamadorians you did not die, only appeared to die, and are very much still alive in the past. How tender, how romantic. The past always has and always will exist. You and I are simply trapped in different ambers, different moments. All we have to do is change tense.

  Last night I dreamt of teeth churned onto the beach from storm surge. Their dull points. Their fossilized roots. The slate and mud of their color. In some continuum they are still intact. White and gnashing. Today the winds howled and the hurricane rained. Today I did not leave my room. Instead, I stood in the stormy glow from my window and photographed my abdomen. I thought about the navel / umbilicus / belly button.

  This cavern. This scar. This mark left by the woman I once belonged to.

  This hole in the very center of me.

  PHILIPPIANS 2:14-15

  Who am I kidding? We’ll never be blameless.

  But maybe if we’re compassionate,

  if we praise more and complain less,

  maybe if we’re generous,

  if we give more and take less,

  maybe if we’re altruists, virtuous,

  if we practice kindness, evolve,

  master our own faults, our own flaws,

  recognize the difference

  between stars and singularities,

  become stelliferous,

  maybe learn to be nocturnal,

  maybe see through all this darkness,

  maybe then,

  we can be forgiven.

  Maybe then,

  we can shine brighter than the rest.

  HIRAETH

  A home which never was.

  The shutters

  On our first home

  Were blue

  In a parallel universe

  We keep the baby

  His birthday cake decorated

  With trick candles

  Blow.blow.blow

  See how his lungs draw

  Smokeless breath

  A wish come true

  He just turned seven

  And I don’t have to wonder

  What we named him

  THE HORIZON IS NOT A LINE

  When you can’t sleep, you tell yourself creation stories. Crack the cosmic egg on the back of a giant tortoise. Dream your druzy dreams. The world is a boundless ocean. Without shore, without horizon. You drift there, in a time before time, cerulean in every direction, glinting under invisible suns. Bad astronomy, you think, and sink below the surface. Dissolve into molecules. Become aqueous. Let the primeval sea swallow you up.

  HELIUM

  I’ve been asking too many questions lately

  like how are you today?

  and were most of your stars out?

  and do you love me?

  You don’t have to answer that.

  I’ve been reading about polyphasic sleep

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Edison and Tesla

  I worry I am not awake enough

  not creating enough

  not (in)sane enough

  My friend says I worry too much.

  He says we are helium.

  Never as heavy as we seem.

  The only place left to go

  is up.

  V. New

  SLOW AS SUMMER

  There’s nothing more

  to the story.

  When we met

  he looked like forever

  & I swore I’d love him

  slow as summer.

  It’s been August

  ever since.

  THE WRAITH

  I.

  On the morning the news breaks the front yard is a blanket of birds and nobody knows the word for this. Everyone sits in the living room, mouths moving inaudibly like a television on mute. In the afternoon we compare the composition of our tears on microscope slides. We cry so hard we laugh; we laugh so hard we cry. There is a chemistry to our sadness and it all comes down to salt.

  II.

  Two days after you pass I drive by Boeing and imagine a hole in the assembly line. I wonder if anyone can read blueprints for a world in which you do not exist. I contemplate the mechanics of flight and consider how my bones have been hollowed by a life so full of loss. Airplanes break apart and fall from the sky.

  III.

  Three days and you have not yet risen. The moon orders a memorial but the tide does not listen. The bay brims with white paint. On this long road to the sea, a small fishing boat gets a makeover. Four red handprints, two fatherless sons. In blue letters: You should be here.

  IV.

  On the fourth day I cross the intersection where the accident happened and see roses tied to the telephone pole. The wreck has been cleared, but the pain is still everywhere. You can feel it hanging in the air, tugging on traffic lights. Lingering in the median—a wraith.

  V.

  Five days have gone by. Five. I count them on grieving fingers.


  VI.

  Day six, we bury you in the earth. Corpses and calla lilies. I wonder how many others cram into the casket. Parts of us only known by you. Secrets between friends, family, lovers. Perhaps we should hold funerals for ourselves too.

  VII.

  Seven days and I still have an ache in my side. I dig into my abdomen to find your rib stuck between my ribs; it is the way God created women.

  And like this I will carry you with me.

  LITTLE LION, ROAMING THE COLD GOLDEN

  I don’t need a photograph to remember.

  Loving you has been a series of moments.

  (In this moment, you’re saving my life.)

  That winter brought ice

  downed power lines

  rolling blackouts.

  Think weather as metaphor.

  Imagine a sadness that stretches for miles.

  The future frozen over.

  Were we to overwinter, I wonder,

  what season would we become?

  You smile,

  and the ground begins to thaw.

  You laugh,

  and the world stops just to watch the melt.

  You run wildly towards a dying sun.

  Oh, how you lean into the light.

  POBLANOS

  The site of the last supper.

  Where I go to be with your ghost.

  No one ever said if you were drinking that night, but I hope you were. Hope you were all bowed strings and burning tempo. Accordion and trilled r’s. An ensemble of smooth vocals and brass horn. Polka rhythm and acoustic guitar. Hope when you left your friends and revved your brand-new motorbike right onto Rivers, veins aflood with tequila and triple sec, fresh-squeezed orange and lime, that you were under the influence of the night. All endorphin, no fear. Feeling invincible, though you never were. Hope you were buzzed when you pummeled into the van crossing onto Dunlap with so much force you overturned it. Hope God plucked your soul from your body long before it ever hit the ground. 250.feet.away. Where you lay. And lay. And lay. Where paramedics found you, a mangle of flesh and bone and fabric and blood. Where you were identified by your wife’s name tattooed on the nape of your neck. Where it was somebody’s job to pronounce you dead.

  No one ever said if you were drinking that night, but I hope you were. Hope you never felt a thing, or what I’m feeling now. This sour stomach. This belly-churning emptiness.

  This death. This death.

  LUCKY NUMBERS

  I’m running out of lucky numbers; I’m running out of luck. It’s been seven years since I rested my head against your sinking chest, begging idle tides to put the moon back in the sky again. Seven years since you held me in the doorway, arms draped around my shoulders, a cloak I wish I could carry with me always. That was the last time I saw you.

  Sometimes I think I didn’t hold you long enough.

  Lately I’ve been praying to my own hands because you told me God lives in them. I’ve been painting my nails oxblood and worshipping the words my fingers pen. Maybe if I create enough beautiful things, I’ll be able to find you in them.

  When I bought my first home, I surrounded it in black holes, because land mines weren’t enough to keep your ghost away. You still came knocking at my door.

  Every time I finish weeding my heart, I have to begin again. Missing you is unlike any labor I’ve ever known. Even when I feel bloodless and my split-chambered heart pumps nothing but question marks through collapsing veins and salt water fills my lungs, I hear you telling me that I’m enough. And now my abdomen is a patchwork of wire mesh from all the times I’ve tried to keep from spilling my guts.

  The truth is, the days between get easier but the anniversaries hurt worse. I feel guilty for the days I don’t mourn your passing, for days I’m not the woman I want to be, a daughter you could be proud of.

  I’m still trying to be enough.

  MULTIVERSE

  what wicked tragedy

  what cruel cosmic trick

  that there should exist a universe

  in which you and I are together

  . . . and this is not it.

  I’VE KEPT QUIET FOR SO LONG

  when I open my mouth

  I’m frightened by the sound

  of my own voice.

  More salt than syrup.

  More rocket launch than crackling fire.

  APEX PREDATOR

  THE WOLF MOON RISES

  behind power lines; she is a promise

  ring of precious metal. The sky, morganite,

  splinters black branches of barren trees

  diverting into dusty rose like bronchioles.

  Night, now a collapsed lung, grabs us by our fur

  coats. We stumble into the champagne dark.

  We curse the stars.

  Curse the soot-covered sidewalks

  illuminated by street lamps, forgotten by gods.

  WINTER DOES NOT COME—

  I hold my breath.

  I am the hunter and the hunted.

  January bangs the brass at my doorstep.

  Nobody’s home. Nobody’s home.

  I DON’T KNOW HOW TO WRITE A POEM

  that doesn’t start or end with my body,

  don’t know how to put pen to paper

  without giving birth

  to the howl and the hunger

  the hell and the hurt.

  MY HEART IS AN APEX PREDATOR;

  it always goes for the throat.

  A GIRL, A GHOST

  Sometimes I

  find mementos

  of who I used to be

  a thousand women ago

  -the scar below my lip

  -freckles on the tip of my nose

  Sometimes I

  right myself through dreamlike

  dimension. delusion.

  I flutter. I float.

  Sometimes I

  catch a glimmer

  catch a glimpse

  of a girl

  of a ghost

  STANDING ON SUNKEN CITIES

  “Sleep in as long as you’d like. The aspirin is in the kitchen.”

  Did he kiss my head when he left? I don’t remember. Did we use protection? I don’t remember that either.

  The secret to surviving hangovers: a hot shower. Expanding blood vessels allow more oxygen to the brain, relieving tension until painkillers kick in. I open cabinets, push aside niacin and protein powder. I think of him, the shape of him, barrel-chested and brawny, how his skin smells of citrus and mahogany.

  In the bathroom, a naked window looks into the woods. Sunlight darts past bicep and breast, flittering wingless;

  where is the poetry in this?

  Sleeping with married men. Standing on sunken cities.

  I feel faint, travel to a stream, hear trickling, surface slaps. Back in the shower, I turn the faucet higher while my thoughts return to my own burning body, stand there until I am speckled, gray in places, until I am salmon-colored,

  dignity sloughing off like the skin of some dead fish.

  I AM LOOKING FOR MY MOTHER

  Have you seen her?

  I wake from dreams where she walks the earth, breathless, her name cotton on my tongue. Every thin floral fragrance could lead me straight to her. I turn my head when top notes of orange and lily stand out in crowds of nameless faces. Sometimes I visit plantation gardens or florists searching for violet, jasmine, Egyptian tuberose. Other times I comb the woods for earthy scents of oak moss and sandalwood. In my closet dwell piles of old clothes soaked in elegant vintage nuance. I cover my face in her ammonia and breathe sorrow deep into my being. I drive by her house but a new mother lives there now, with new children who do not look like my sisters
or me. When I meet her again in dream I ask where she has been. Trying to find you, she says. In waking life I know this to be impossible. Against all rationality I search because it is the only act that brings me peace and where I find purpose, that temporarily fills the unfillable hole left in my soul from her departure, a search I cannot abandon until my own days are numbered and I am nothing but a pile of bones born of her bones.

  I am looking for my mother.

  Have you seen her?

  CRACKED WIND

  The pills were round. They called them orange, but they were more of a peach than anything, a color trying too hard to look like flesh, to insinuate living.

  In Avalon, a ghost bicycles around 29th Street on a classic red frame, coming & going impossibly slow. Whenever the service bell rings at the Sunoco, I know it’s him. I feel better if I don’t look.

  25mg was a small dose. That’s why I took so many.

  When the island’s outdoor warning system sounds,

  I am lucid

  I am moving my vehicle to higher ground

  I am cracked wind

  vacuuming ash from the third-story balcony

  my veins are pumping gasoline.

  Everything has side effects, if you think about it.

  I don’t know who I am without the people I love. Am I losing them all to floods? They rot; we rust. We put them to rest.

  The side effect of living is death.

  MIDAS TOUCHED THE MOUNTAINS

  the blue ridge turned golden

  below the escarpment

  the vermillion and gilt

  of rusted car frames and all the hearts

  that had been stolen

  that night

  we spray – painted the stars

  graffitied over bald rock

  shared a single pillow

  on a blow – up mattress

  our limbs made of metal

  our tongues tasting iron

  and I wondered

  if we had the same dream.

  PROPHECY

  It happened just like you said: