Space Struck

by Paige Lewis

I don’t think I’ve ever written the word doom, but nothing else fits. Every experience seems both urgent and unnatural—like right now, this train is approaching the station where my beloved is waiting to take me to the orchard, so we can pay for the memory of having once, at dusk, plucked real apples from real trees.

NO ONE CARES UNTIL YOU’RE THE LAST OF SOMETHING

most of what I see, I see through the gaps in my fingers. This sort of looking has turned me boring—

All constellations are organisms and all organisms are divine and unfixed.

How much must I swallow before I can say that the foxes are back, possessing our forest, asking, Where are your fruits?

BECAUSE THE COLOR IS HALF THE TASTE it’s a shame to eat blackberries in the dark,

I learn the universe is an arrow without end and it asks only one question: How dare you?

The color is half the pain. Why would anyone else want to see? How dare they?

a miracle is anything that God forgot to forbid.

The miracle here is not that these women swallowed light. It’s that, when their skin dissolved and their jaws fell off, the Radium Corporation claimed they all died from syphilis. It’s that you’re telling me about the dull slivers of dead saints, while these women are glowing beneath our feet.

Even I don’t trust myself enough to end on my own words.

When I arrive it will be easy to find which garden is mine.

It’s selfish to want to witness awe— to stand in a museum and shift your gaze between the painting and your reflection in its frame.

I wonder if we name storms because naming is the only power we’re left with. Give me more time and I’m sure I could make this funny.

Once, I woke and believed myself full of the old heaven.

Lord, teach me patience, for every fruit I’ve ever picked has been unripe.