Astronomy
Moonrise over ocean horizon. My father
teaches me to shoot
photos through a telescope, craters and ridges
rise like pockmarked skin
beneath a fluorescent light. This was now. I loved
the night lilies. The tigers, too,
that grew in my father’s garden, the way
something was always
awake, waiting.
~
I gathered worms and black swimming beetles
from the backyard pool
into jars of water. Look at them dance! I told him.
They’re carnivores, he informed me.
What did I know
about cruelty then, how accidental it could be?
~
My father gives me
a thimble-sized light on a keychain
that flashes morse code for SOS
if you turn the head
counterclockwise. For emergencies, he says.
It was his. One night I try it
in a dark parking garage, let the strobe
guide me to my rental car. Spinning the lens,
the head detaches, and out pops
a small pale pill, a tiny moon
landing in my hand.
~
The Big and Little Dippers,
Those are us, I told him. Ursa Major
and Minor, he taught me. Soon after
that first night at my father’s house
a telescope appeared near the lilies.
That one’s not a star, he told me,
that’s Venus, the orange hue
coming into focus in the viewfinder.
My favorite star, really
our nearest planet. 24 million miles
away. We learned to love each other
through space. Decks of constellations
left on my nightstand. The stars
he hoped I would arrange into Orion’s belt
scattered haphazardly
across my ceiling. The telescope I tell him
it’s okay to sell. What wouldn’t I give
to close that distance now?
Jamie L. Smith is the author of The Flightless Years and Trojan Horses: Voices from the Opioid Crisis. Her work appears in publications including Best New Poets, Southern Humanities Review, Tusculum Review, An*dyne, Palisades Review, and elsewhere.
Carousel Animals Before Restoration
Laid on their sides, my gloved hand
to torso, chin, neck, the other
with pick. Giraffe 4A is nine paint layers
stripped, neck narrow between fingers
a two-grit sandpaper routine ear-tip to frozen
tail flick—Horse 2C
with his left hoof crooked, muzzle
tucked and Cow, who I
sat before and found
empty—a wooden facade—like the boats in
separate wings at the Met. Reassembled,
built after arrival—or were walls cut
open to float each
into position and how many
gloved hands helped guide.
Jenna Breiter is a writer and visual artist living in Brooklyn, NY.