I.

we’re sitting on the edge of an
overturned rain barrel.
he is looking at the sky
and i am looking at him.
“it’s beautiful,” he says,
face turned upwards.

i nod.

the sky reflected in his eyes is black and vast and starry,
a singularity in his pupils,
a multiverse in his retinas.
the moonlight plays across his skin, and
his lips are slightly parted, as if he’s
hoping to taste the stardust,
hoping for it to explode like pop rocks
across his tongue.

“look,” he says. “andronmeda.”
his finger traces
the space between the stars,
painting an abstract connection.
“pisces.”
he looks over at me,
smiles
slantedly, recklessly,
before he reaches out and takes my arm.
i yelp, panicking, but he’s ignoring me.
he’s taking a sharpie and connecting the sunspots
that dot my skin like
cookie crumbs in milk.
thin black lines crisscross my arm.

“ursa minor.”

II.

“all things come from stardust,
and to stardust all things return.”

he is stardust now.

he is (was)
a comet, (or a meteor, i never quite
understood the difference.)
he is (was)
a supernova,
exploding into colors that seared
the inside of my eyelids.
he is (was)
a black hole
making obsolete my gravity
so i
fell
into
him
and
all
that
he
is.

(was.)

III.

sitting in science class, i bite my tongue.
i clench my hands into white knuckled fists.
the teacher points at the whiteboard; she
traces the shapes of the stars and says their names.

traces his stars.

she has no right.

she has no right to trace his stars, to speak their names
in the same way he did (except different, so so different).

shehasnorightshehasnorightshehasno-

they send me home early, something about a nervous breakdown.

IV.

i’m sitting on the edge of an
overturned rain barrel,
and i’m looking at the sky,
and i’m realizing that it does not belong to me.

andromeda does not belong to me, and
pisces does not belong to me, and
ursa minor does not belong to me.

because i never really looked at the sky, did i?
the only sky i saw
was reflected in his eyes.
the only moon i saw
was shining inside his skin.

now that he is stardust
i see the heavens for what they really are.
molecules.
atoms.
scattered clumps of dust.
the constellations don’t exist.
they are nothing but a construct,
a heavy-handed fairy tale
created by presumptuous humans with their
sharp pencils, playing connect-the-dots.

i didn’t wash my arm after the last time
he traced the constellations between my sunspots,
but it faded over time nonetheless.
just like all things fade
until there’s nothing left but memories of
lips that taste like stardust,
eyes that shine like multiverses.