Red & emerald

red & emerald circle the dog star
by LE Francis

Twin stars, once twin bright,
until the dog star set off
into early middle age. You burned
like a backcountry grove, & you
became the end of clouds

& comets. You wrought new
planets of bone & mist & spite,
to devise & reform, destroy
& reset the atoms that made
you burn. There was no definition

clever enough to make you
accept, & no fact that did not
look better behind the flash
of your teeth. You shone, twin star,
by your own dawn, a frequency

of will & of body. There was no other
way for the hand to fall, the tensest
of shoulders holding under its weight.
My dear, we’re part of this mystery —
you rage & yet there is much to hear

in the quiet, in the nowhere, where fires die
without anyone knowing they’re gone, where
whispers of someday resolve & all sides
of the sky hum & tremble with the mistakes
we made & meant to forget. Bright as you are,

there is home in the dark & once your
eyes shift, you’ll see. Burning is no way
to build a life & the brightest light can make
for the best reason to turn away.


LE Francis is a recovering arts journalist writing poetry & fiction of varying length from the rainshadow of the Washington Cascades. Her work has recently appeared in Sage Cigarettes, Mookychick, Nightingale and Sparrow, and Marías at Sampaguitas. Visit her website http://nocturnical.com/ or follow her @nocturnical.

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