Dear Starship-My-Own-Dead, Dear God, dear pulse
trapped in this wheel of Your galactic rain: all I want
is the turn, all I want is to know that the turn around
her late vast black-ribboned star collapsing will keep
me inside You, flung and fleshed and yes, immobile against
the sorrow wall, centrifugal, will keep me spinning O
Away into the strange press-breath comfort of not being
here, not stomach not sugar not spit, not being upright in the red chair
of the living. Dear Lord, I know it’s wrong, know the cat
lifts his morning neck to me and I have children, but
Please. If she can just keep dying, if still her sunbraid
burning, if Never’s starry splay can cry me back
and back so hard ongoing flat and that can last, erupting
louder than any hair I breathe, I can stick to the cheap physics
of this universe’s brute sci-fi slide. I can’t–O Don’t let me–stop,
uncurl, drink and pool, taste bright her summer voice. Whirl
and whirl on, Lord. Keep me banked so that no fine
bits can touch me slow from the lamps the pines
and tongues of this place, where skin and wrong my own
dreamchild hands are why I lost O–help me–what I had.
–
Sally Rosen Kindred’s third poetry collection is Where the Wolf (Diode Editions), winner of the 2021 Julie Suk Award. Her poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Cave Wall, Poet Lore, and Kenyon Review Online.