Constellations in a Multiverse
Don’t worry which fork to use. This is a poem for spoons
smooth as the mirror surface
of a neighbor’s midnight pool. A lifted latch,
a quiet plunge. Shhh.
This is the neighbor’s pool, their trespassed yard.
Even the hour is stolen.
Sh. You hush into my open mouth just like in movies
if I had planned a better bra. Some film
where twenty somethings soft-land into kind lives
from the cliff of a miracle fuck that synchs the clicks–
tricked from the tumbler on a bonus safe. As if
this film fucking guaranteed a happy ending. No.
It didn’t go that way. The ugly bra awkward smile was me.
You the widely rumored maybe dad of some other
pretty swimmer’s baby. Thus the rubber
buggy laugh I couldn’t quiet. Then
we didn’t kiss. Just sank
enough to ripple the sky and dance the stars
as night grew still and quiet filled
the neighbor’s pool, that night, those
sharply separate stories of the sky
that led you west, me east.
I remember it as if it were true—
you called the stars the by name and
pinned them to their legends.
As you explained the constellations,
I slipped off, braless,
into the nameless dark between.
Debra Rymer is a public school teacher in New York City. She has loved reading and writing poetry for over 50 years, but is only recently submitting poems for publication. These are poems from a place of raw sobriety. This is a voice fired to glass.