Is it absurd to wonder whether galaxies mourn the death of their stars? I assign breath to entities with no lungs; I expect the by-product of body chemicals to exist in the incomprehensible space between stars. Love, sometimes the only way to move from today to tomorrow is to stretch my limbs into these voids and pretend I’m an object without edges. I’m not afraid of being an absence in your day. Curve your arms around the boundary of where you expect me to end. Trust that the air within your kisses brushes past my cheek and grazes the ticklish spot behind my ear. I’m the flicker of laughter against your wrist when you can’t keep your eyes open to see the northern lights. Accept: you can’t make me tangible using astrophysics. But I’ll stay here. We can contemplate nebulae until one of us imagines a new star.
Can you define me by what I am not?
Last updated on December 6, 2021
Jessica Coles (she/her) is a poet and editor from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (Treaty 6 territory), where she lives with her family and a judgmental tuxedo cat named Miss Bennet. Check out the About page for more info.
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Love is such an amorphous word