Cyanstains

There will be no stars—the poem has had enough of them. I think we

      can agree we no longer believe there is anyone in any poem who is just now

      realizing

they are dead, so let’s stop talking about it. The skies of this poem are teeming with winged things, and not a single innominate bird.

You’re welcome. Here, no monarchs, no moths, no cicadas doing

      whatever they do in the trees. If this poem is in summer, punctuating the blue—

      forgive me,

I forgot, there is no blue in this poem—you’ll find the occasional pelecinid wasp, proposals vaporized and exorbitant, angels looking

as they should. If winter, unsentimental sleet. This poem does not take

      place at dawn or dusk or noon or the witching hour or the crescendoing

      moment

of our own remarkable birth, it is 2:53 in this poem, a Tuesday, and       everyone in it is still at work. This poem has no children; it is trying

to be taken seriously. This poem has no shards, no kittens, no myths or

      fairy tales,

no pomegranates or rainbows, no ex-boyfriends or manifest lovers,       no mothers—God,

no mothers—no God, about which the poem must admit it’s relieved, there is no heart in this poem, no bodily secretions, no

      body

referred to as the body, no one dies or is dead in this poem, everyone in this poem is alive and pretty

okay with it. This poem will not use the word beautiful for it resists calling a thing what it is. So what

if I’d like to tell you how I walked last night, glad, truly glad, for the

      first time in a year, to be breathing, in the cold dark, to see them. The stars, I

      mean. Oh hell, before

something stops me—I nearly wept on the sidewalk at the sight of them