Milky

Christy Prahl

A clear morning before the sun is air without weather. Without oversight. Just . . . super novas. Planets. They fall sometimes, pulled akimbo by satellites, surveying what feels like the last person left in the world.

In the cities there may be a thrum, but here, away, it is lonely in the stillborn blanket of the thing.

Overhead, a moon, glaring. A bright light that may be Jupiter. Stars strung together like diamonds in the teeth. Children can see them, drawing lines between that make dead astronomers articulate again. Yes, that’s the one. Exactly.

But my shapes are all wrong. No cup. No archer. The zinnia. The biplane. The catastrophe. Cipher for the other things I can’t seem to get right. How do you get a cake to rise in a pan? How do you set this ringer to silent? How does a body hold a baby?

There’s a density to what I fail to know. It could fit in a ship, fill the acreage of the gardens that hold this building where we’ve all come, all of us –to be in our sadness together.

They’ve told us to let go and they’ll catch us before our backs hit the linoleum, eventually packing us off with our cargoes of loss to figure out how to exist in the quiet, reckless mornings and the gravity.

Christy Prahl is the author of the collection We Are Reckless, forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, her past and future publications include the Eastern Iowa Review, Peatsmoke Journal, Passengers Journal, West Trestle Review, and others. She has enjoyed residencies at both Ragdale and the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow and is the founder of the PenRF reading series. She splits her time between Chicago and rural Michigan and appreciates subways and siloes in equal measure. More of her work can be found at https://christyprahl.wixsite.com/christy-prahl.