Both pieces are still available on the magazine’s website.

“…Like you didn’t know” is part of a line from Mastodon’s “Stargasm.” & this is yet another poem reckoning with where I stand on the asexual spectrum & how discordant it feels to feel attraction to someone.

Stars is the title of the digital drawing that ran with the poem.

“… Like you didn’t know”

I lean back & let the stars run over my skin,
my eyes closing as I sink into this deep nothing
night & feel the last chords of the song scatter

like the last sparks of a fire that couldn’t root
in a limb too recently alive. I, who have been
too recently dead, can feel the heat as it settles,

embers burning new paths through me, becoming
a hope that wraps around my bones & thrums near
my heart in the old familiar language of wanting.

I don’t want to be burning, my body the same
as the steppe, writhing under the clouds
that hide my damage from the sky, nobody

knowing how I’ve changed until I am consumed,
reduced, & open — eyes fixed on the empty space
where I once saw god or something like it,

the cosmos reaching out to pull me from gray
to green to black. Leave me in this mystic emptiness,
in the wonder that unknowing knows, with the coals

of wanting cooling in my lungs, my breath caught
between the winds that touched stars & my voice
too heavy with hiding to rise above the ash.