your father lets us look at jupiter in his telescope. i press my eye to the spyglass, try to say something profound but instead only vomit ugly words that don’t fit together. i am learning things that i have always known; that my voice will never be poetry, will never flow sweet and easy and clear as water or blood. i want to explain this but you are already gone.

---

firelight crowns the rim of your forehead like a halo. your laugh is toothless, likened to something divine and holy descended unto shepherds, beautiful in a sacred way and terrifying in the same. i am begging you to come down to me in your human form so i can look at you without screaming. let me count the shades of pink in your fingernails: salmon, meaning kindness. coral, meaning femininity. peach, meaning nothing.

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when i first met you you were the moon. it’s different each time i remember it. you smiled at me grabbed my hand called me a b*tch kissed me twisted my guts bled me dry. whatever happened, i was awake all night replaying it in my brain like a record. again and again and over and over until i memorized every cadence in your voice. listening to my heartbeat and imagining yours next to it. i did not glow star-soft like dew. i was dark. 

---

an inventory of things on your back porch: fire pit with no cover, flowerpots with dead things in them, old blankets, lawn chairs, bricks with missing pieces. a rot that crunches beneath my feet. an empty space between us that eats me alive. silence like the blackness behind your father’s telescope.

---

your mother has a rainbow wreath on her door and calls herself an ally in our war. she is teaching you to love all of your pieces. my mother taught me this same lesson, but she did it with a chisel. her name is spelled prometheus and i am her clay; she shapes me, calls me confused, brings me in and forms me neatly. now, she says when she is finished, you are beautiful. i am tired of believing her.

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i am thinking about jupiter and her moons, calypso and io and eurydice trailing out behind her like a broken string of pearls. there is gravity between them, anchoring them with silver strings like fishline, pulling them in. more and more i start to believe that the same strings exist between my cheek and your shoulder, my fingers and yours, the spaces in our lips. an invisible and incurable sort of yearning. i stop myself before we collide. we are too much like jupiter, her tempests and storms, beautiful in a way that was never meant to exist.

---

maybe if i had a boy’s name it would be different. i will shave my head, square my jaw. tighten my fingers against your tendons and smile like you belong to me. strip myself down and scrub myself of sin. in this way i will become a man. maybe then we wouldn’t have to spend hours convincing ourselves that we haven’t done anything wrong.

---

so strange the way time decays, the way it rots and ferments. what will be left of this night in a year? i hope it does not sharpen into a joke or blur into a haze or fall apart entirely. i hope it wilts like a flower does, colorless and dry but still beautiful in the way that dead things are beautiful.

---

you go inside before i can kiss you and suddenly i realize that jupiter’s moons are not freckled pebbles an inch apart. there is a chasm between them, vast and infinite and so, so silent. i watch the fire and let the quiet crush my ribs. try to catch a breath but cough up smoke. pretend i am made of clay and only feel what i am supposed to.

if we weren’t two girls under

this merciless sky maybe

we could have been more