This poem is still available on the magazine’s website.
Heart, sun, & hearth star, a synastry of light years, brightly wound measures drag a moment across the slope of the sky; gravity of metric gallop caught in the beats between his fingers & the echo in the throat of heaven. There is resonance wherever there is emptiness & there is nothing more empty than god, than existing, than my mind in the moment our eyes met. Let my prayer ring in the dissonance between intention & the unconquerable power of heaven; let it ring in the dead heart of a faraway star; let it ring in the fusion fires, dying as the night ebbs. Could I hold the scarlet consonance of Mars in the dread well of my body? The minor mode of Jupiter answers my heart when I cannot answer to the music of his eyes. Natural system, true note, every movement has an answer, a dulcet tone against the universal root & all that is empty rings with the jewelled worlds that transit their skies & nothing is more empty than
god, if I only would have said…
I wrote this poem as part of the first section “Electricty” of “This Spell of Song & Star.”
Most of the book came together piece by piece between late November 2019 & late June 2022. & in September of 2023 I was encouraged to enter a chapbook competition & dug through my published work to see what I could weave together. At a basic level “This Spell of Song & Star” is a collection of poems I wrote about having an enduring crush on a guy I locked eyes with for a few seconds in a cafe & only to find out a few hours later that he wasn’t a random guy I’d never see again, but a musician in a band that I actually quite like & would see again multiple times.
I just decided to take that spark, that longing, & make something out of it — in fact I used that feeling & my resistance to it to make a lot of different projects go. Instead of shooting my shot & potentially making it awkward to see the band live, I used it to change my perspective, to help me see the world as beautiful just as it is. Nothing has come of it but it changed me & that’s what the book is ultimately about.