print previewback SARA ELIZA JOHNSON
Asteroseismology
uses the natural resonances of stars to reveal
their properties and inner structures.
Like all deaths I am bottomless,
a coma. But there is a photon,
there is inside my core
an electric cloud, a brain
decaying like a city after black rains
and inside it a remnant:
dream I can barely see
the shape of—
we’re sitting in a field and
then we’re making love
and you have no face, just light
and the sun pools into my back
and the sun pools
its weight into the stag’s back
as it bends to drink from a stream beside us
while a chemical snow drifts
downwind onto the red muscle
of the water, deposits
silvered petals but never spring
and abandoned after
and for long, our feral thirst
finds no end, only a bending
to drink again—
even as wind strips the meat
from the deer’s skeleton,
as we are just spines,
as the eye eats itself into cataract,
a white ring around the pupil:
the floating cloud
of your face I can no longer
make out, that vaporizes
before I can reach it
though through the spectroscope,
deep inside the cavity,
like a handful of melted uranium
the glow remains. 