A Series of Scenes of Your Self-Destruction

by haleyadmeliora

[this poem appears in the December 2016 Space issue of Severine Literary Journal]

I
Maybe I thought we were cosmic because your bedroom reminded me of deep space. Hollow and pinpoint light, gravity and silence. They pioneered a probe and found us, the latest scientific discovery, the sound of black holes colliding. They returned in awe and with audio. They had bentbacks leak us into their ears and transcribe us on paper: all brackets, no speech. They published us in journals. Some say the recording sounded like being underwater. Some say it sounded like a child’s heartbeat in the hand of God. All I hear in it now is the low roar of a lonely blood rush—the sound of sitting here cupping my hands over my ears. When this started I said I wouldn’t

think about astrophysics—I wouldn’t think about parasitic absences of light more massive than stars. I would steel my limbs against gravity, the mirage of stability that fluctuates infinitely and (in)definitely. I would try to remind you of the bodies orbiting us resounding with proof that our duty is beyond spinning moons. And for a while it worked: we fought the yawn of all that negative space with blunt force, with sinewed dual orbits—but we couldn’t hide from the event horizon. You know that I stretched myself galaxy-wide for you. I wish your arms could’ve escaped Nothing’s pull and clung to me.

(I heard they’re learning you can escape from black holes.)

II
I awake from this telescopic cosmodream to find us terrestrial again. I awake, and you are a manmade natural disaster. Your shoulders creep steadily past your ears and our oceans rise inch by insidious inch. You embrace subduction like submission and our deep-earth drills birth earthquakes. You are a coal seam screaming danger, hissing fire speech from steaming teeth. I always hear fears of coal fires but never about the men who brave the mines still, steeling eyes to onyx, daily daring the maws that mirror lovers’ mouths. I find myself among them: fire under my eyelids, soot on my skin. I know the pressure could tear me blood from bone but, god, can you blame me if when morningbreak steals its kiss I don my boots, I shoulder my pick, I soldier still

just to see the pain leak, covering your skin dark my love, viscous as an oil spill and flammable. The heave of crude waste pockmarks you, puddles in your bones. I am embarrassed to have thought us cosmic, to have made constellations of our laughter, to have been the canary in your coalmine. I am embarrassed to invoke us now like the fires of the stars when the last thing I saw of you was a lit match and the image it burned of your shrinking shadow in a stuffy bedroom that looked nothing like deep space.