Celestus Memorius
Send me to the moon,
love, when it’s the end
of the world or us,
forever a fiction made
from science the way
astronauts failed to find
another place to survive
when they grew tired of living
with their feet tethered
to the ground and gravity
is a luxury easy to forget
like your body orbiting
mine or a world existing
long enough to call it history
so let’s constellate a myth—
a cup, an arrow—to light
the dark, call ships home,
though we both know
no one will escape
the bomb smoke billow
rising ocean tide, wars
we create to control
a story where saving
something proves impossible
and I’m sorry for the years,
my many tears, for it was cold
alone at the edge, space
supposed to be our compromise
but then I was weightless
without you and unclipped
the cord, convinced I could
endure that emptiness alone.
Pith
Peel me tender
hearted, rind to remind
of citrus pucker
in winter’s brittle
dead. It is not
difficult to dissemble—
skin an invitation
to puncture and pulse,
old cuts a chance
to feel the sting
and how you halve
me like prayer
splay me open butterfly
under a pin, cage
of the body on the feast
spittle. I will give you good
meat, the kind of flesh
worth taking your time
to strip, pare away pith,
leave smooth and veinless,
the easy kind of body
to crush between your teeth.
Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press), Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press), and three poetry chapbooks. She is an Assistant Professor at Bridgewater State University. You can follow her on Twitter at @SF_Montgomery