HEATHER HUGHES

Margin / Mitosis

Martian fishbones leak, leech

off to startle a meteor.  You’re lost —

past freezing, past that thinnest layer

of protection, the scrim

that should be, but no. Gone.

I snag, grab, can’t cast loose.

Can’t parse your slimmest hints,

scales and salt promises. Look

through the Very Large

Telescope. Look again,

mass evaporation — and don’t tell

what happens in the lens.

The beginning: such bang and boil

and the difference

between cell and cell,

me and you. Listen

to our chorus of division —

we seek light, that vagabond fossil,

among the junk, among 

spines fathoming freestyle.

heather hughes hangs her heart in Boston and Miami. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Bad Penny Review, Cream City Review, Grain, Gulf Coast, Hinchas de Poesia, Jai-Alai Magazine, and Vinyl. Sometimes she can be found making inky letterpress messes. She MFA-ed at Lesley University and ALM-ed at Harvard Extension. All her tattoos have wings.