E.B. SCHNEPP
radium girl, promise you won’t live forever.
we all have those lives we’ve never really lived
so much as survived as long as we could. twenty-nine,
running out of time, feeling the sands,
my own personal hourglass chase me down it’s throat, two years
past the 27 club and six months from being too old to have an excuse
for not doing anything with my life I understood resurrection
for the first time. I want a do over. I want to get it right next time,
but I’m no longer sure what the world of next time looks like
—see the constellations? they’ve already begun to fall
from the horizon, someone in a board room is naming new ones
made from clusters of satellites, space debris, somewhere
someone already knows our new horoscopes. ziggy stardust’s lightning
bolt flashing in shades of blue and red at the horizon’s edge
in late october, an acoustic guitar raining teardrop sparks
from its strings, the queen’s own crown, her orbiting honey bee,
the bold number seven where the milky way once was,
the blues saxophone illuminating the southern hemisphere, it’s reed
marking the equator, a broken heart pulsing behind the aurora borealis
to the north—sometimes that’s just how it goes, the gods fall
from the sky, the gods become rock stars, or
the rock stars become gods, and someone puts them back
into the sky where the rest of us can divine
our own futures in their orbits.
E.B. Schnepp is a writer currently residing in Indiana. Their work can also be found in Up the Staircase, Cumberland River Review, and Roanoke Review, among others.