Estrella Poetry
Steven O. Young, Jr. Redford, Michigan, USA
In a bed never meant for us, in a place I no longer belong, sleep skirts my lakeshores as she dreams peaceably beside me, an island lulled by the steady rhythm of the waves lapping between us. A slow succession of light steals over the grains of grays and grace, serenity in the essences of lead and lampblack. I lie atop finger-twitch flicks of grass, a pencil professing my affections in wild flourishes filling a field with the stems of chocolate cosmos, anxious to explode in the semi-sweet scent of amorous galaxies. At the edge of my eye, I watch her guide the pineapple moon along an arc she’s carved in the canvas of her Caribbean sky. She arrives at my side and traces the contours of my whittled bones snug against her calligraphic nib, teasing out ink that slinks away on its thousands of feet below the soft blades buoying my body, and I conceal my inchoate creation before she reveals the art of her work— two wind-smoothed dunes of supple muscle, and the orange effusion of moonlight
through the bulb of a balloon cast across the crests of a valley cradling a thin river of shadow that erodes the globe’s glow. I study the illustration until I imagine the emergence of ridges in the sand, soft swells of sudden castles I want to topple or top off, my hands ready to level or lift the stories of amative earth. Only when I see the way she waits among the unbudded cosmos, the moon situated to shape the topography of her thighs, do I understand my oblivious awe. Gathering the loose petals of my letter together, I arrange them head-to-toe and back again, every inch of her periphery blossoming as the pages serrate and lobe into heliconia and damiana, the yearning mouths of angel’s trumpets dangling between her fingers. I save a blank leaf for her stomach as my pencil roams the margins of her ribs, spiraling down the shallow pit of her navel, each exploring symbol transcribed to her core. By the time everything is written, she’s already read it, and sets the sheet beneath her raven hair, where it takes root and blooms
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into a tree with gold-bottomed leafs shimmering above us. She plucks the lowest branch and searches a sleek, purple sphere for the vestige of its stem. La estrella, she says, pressing it against my chest, then laughing as I motion to bite the flesh, unacquainted with the delicacy: Let it ripen off the tree. Give its heart’s star of seeds time unattached to the sky so it can grow into the gravity of its own constellation. I take the deep, rich fruit from my mouth and see its luster in her eyes, gleaming between the velvet flounces of her black baccara rose corollas— the plunging depth inside the sepal lashes what I truly want to taste. It’s softened by the soured moonlight spilling like juice through the balloon of my head onto the estrella, orange streaks highlighting the heights of her valley already swept off in the current of shadow as the moon disappears, as the balloon disappears, as she disappears with the abundance of flora. She’s no longer sleeping or beside me; I hold my phone glowing with her handdrafted sunrise in the confidence
