If each moment encompasses all time – let me lose the constraint of this body leap into the galaxy cross dimensions as an astronaut blasts through earth’s atmosphere or an ant crosses the shortened string. Let me bend the time-space continuum cut the tether that ties me inside my skin and touch their hands once again. I want to co-exist within other worlds that flash in the corners of my eyes, mingle with molecules that shift to make space for unseen density. Lately, I’ve been looking into the night sky, searching for two new stars born of gas and dust. Maybe one day my core will become hot enough to ignite fusion and I’ll be reborn too, my leftover particles becoming dust tumbling across the universe as dust to dust I return. Light from distant stars takes time to travel – I see their light within my darkness but they are always there, always have been, like the lost, our dead. Like fog around a street lamp, death covers their light only momentarily. In December, within the nanosecond between the light leaving their eyes to touch my face, they changed. Everything changed. I want to breathe again within that nanosecond, to inhale the gaze that escaped that day. And yet… here I stand, feet solidly on the earth, while all around me centuries of sorrow swirl throughout the firmament and black holes swallow stars within the whole of a single breath. This morning I shook my fists at G-d – not because of death, but because gravity is heavier than my imagination or star dust.
Margaret Anne Kean received her BA in British/American Literature from Scripps College and her MFA from Antioch University/Los Angeles. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in poems.for.all.com, Eunoia Review, Drizzle Review, EcoTheo Review and Tupelo Quarterly. She is collaborating with a Portland, Oregon composer to set a tanka series. Kean lives in Pasadena, California.
