The moon hung like a slice of white lime in the boundless blue sky,
her watchful eye a site of reckoning.
Night’s ideals are superimposed on daylight,
the outlines of faintly fading planets visible from the car window.
Venus glows, a stark reminder of love and public transit.
I was on the bus, muttering your name through a coughing fit,
akin to the manner of soft footfalls on rotted terrain,
gentle enough to keep the building from caving in.
You call, and it’s the skin of a peach falling to the cutting board,
all the decorum of Turgenev’s prose; it’s like a summer evening—
impossible yet existent. We trade indulgences,
the sour cherries struck against black liquorice on my tongue.
Venus in Virgo, house of self-respect, the thought of you like a lighthouse
white and resplendent across the frozen docks.
Joy is a woman’s name, her long thick hair free in the wind,
red carnations trailing in her wake, the crease of a smile aglow.
A beam that drowns out the rest of light; did you know the brightest planet
in the solar system is Venus, which makes sense because it was named for love,
radiant and remembered.
British Columbia, you offered, the long run on the table, vivid blues
and bold yellows plucked from the air like a January frost.
All of Rome’s fires are doused now, the woman on the hill
deserting her long held post to take up a simpler prayer.
Here I am, a satellite returned, battle-ready with
missives handwritten from the otherworld.
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