There are no photos from Halloween 1999
Saturn is almost entirely hydrogen and helium, except for its icy core. It is the only planet we know of that would float in a bathtub. I dressed as Saturn for halloween the year my parents got divorced couldn't sit down for circle time with my hoola-hoop rings, but when I tasted freeze-dried space pizza I renounced my otherworldly pursuits spit it out had to think up something else to be. It is daytime; it is nighttime. Waking here sleeping there. I am heavy, thick, alive with storms, and I consume that which I love most, certain love is a faint star. It is nighttime again. Which I begin to prefer. I sneak out to smoke because I can.
Blastoff!
I heard: You’re going to be a writer! Often. In high school, magical realism a disguise to starve off the abandonment by a friend whose floor I slept on every other Saturday for nine months. It’s true, I was always writing, but I didn’t think of myself, and the writing as inseparable. And the wound remains. Untended to. Now I write this poem because gravity requires precision. And, for a few days, dizzy with grief. And, stringing together cohesive prose— My cat smells like death. A smell familiar, after a long afternoon next to a taxidermy table, at the art popup where I sell my prints and watercolors and when I first sell a linocut to a stranger I am launched so high I watch the earth recede into a marble and I didn’t know space was so black and I didn’t know success was a moving target that my first publication would feel like nothing.
