Three Pieces
Anastasia Fenald
dead sister squad headlines the stars tonight
undead are the nightclub. we wear cracked glowstick souls. wailing every time we touch I get this feeling, caught in millennial nostalgia. never touching the exposed bones. the raw nerves. the elegy voicemail.
like Jack and Rose. and the door. and too late second chances, homey video film separates Titanic VHS tapes. three hours divided between two and one. our years divided between ninety-two and ninety-seven. a tape fissioned falls apart. a family fissioned falls apart. one heart stills goes on. one heart does not.
my phone vibrates in this vape haze. vibrates in this nightclub wake. skin decaying. spirits melting. shadows the only evidence. another word for this is avoidance.
(swing high, sweet time coming for to carry her home
swing high, sweet time coming for to carry all home)
atoms are the nightclub. swarm all us undead. particle after molecule both carbon and people, both stardust and ash. pull apart and flatline a vinyl disc. her vinyl heart spinning on a turntable with no axis rotation.
this is the big freeze, the anti-crunch theory, digitized in untextured polygons, polaroid pictures tear stained and blurry, sipped through CGI monitored straws. the blue diamond that Rose drops a muted disco ball mourning at the bottom in siren sea dirges.
and sense reflects in the common change scattered against the green screen backdrop of childhood memories, trying to fill the gap with tomorrows instead of todays, trying to formulate the physics of heartbreak
us cosmic nightclub zombies bear the universe. whisper atoms divided fall apart. explode apart. whisper goodbyes we never say. drift in honeyed thermodynamic grief. drift in her unwanted text messages. drift in make believe family vacations. i don’t think i can breathe. i’m told she stopped breathing. alone. in her bed. the day after valentine’s,
we undead atoms are the nightclub. stretched universe as one. subjected to interpreted fate perceived as one being with no beings to perceive. one kinetic pulsing movement, in the dips and lows, in lungs and blood. virtuous virtue not the answer prophesied, but I'm still grasping for some equation to explain the after. some equation to explain the how come.
and the crowd screams when the obituary drops. in the words of Marcus Aurelius death smiles at all of us. and dial-up is the beat, the busy tone. the sound of drowning in the crowd she’d be too young to know.
I get a call from the flower shoppe. telling me even at the edges of collapsed universes. at the void from snuffed out lights. cell service can traverse this moment stuck in time.
I need to pick up the lilied arrangement for my sister’s funeral.
Slingshot
For Katie
"Try not to forget how far your soul stretches."
My friend writes to me in a poem, as if she has always known I have been elastic instead of stone, I have always been water, measured in volume instead of weight, for I am weightless—I am the astronaut walking on the International Space Station, breathless in the starry waves swelling oceans high above the atmosphere, and if I fall to Earth, I would not be a harbinger meteorite hellbent on annihilating civilization, but instead I would drift like a January autumn leaf in California, out of season, running late, stuck in traffic, but somehow always continuing onwards as I transform into the wayward birthday balloon a little girl didn't hold tight enough and I would float in the way angels fly, towards the sky, past the heavens, trailing the Hubble Space Telescope, while absorbing the journey of car wrecks and puppy barks and parent death and children born, of life not measured in stones but in the volume between every star.
Dear Human
you stand in the same place, in the same way, as billions before you—
eyes wide, pulled back with invisible clothes pins as you try to drink in the sight of me,
try to swallow me with your comprehension so feeble
and you drown in my rippling currents, you struggle to swim in the foam of my waves,
my each and every star a mere scale of a large fish
refusing to be reeled in by the mere parameters of your existence.
oh Human,
you say you are made from my children as if you are also my child, as if the compounds of my body
make up your body, as if my body is your bread and my blood your wine,
as if I can be concentrated into bite sized morals when I am the summation of all that is,
all your cells so minuscule that there is no word for your insignificance,
no language to explain you are nothing before nothing despite you survive
on your singular, tiny, unremarkable planet,
and there must be an error in the possibility of our shared reality.
but Human,
dear small, meaningless Human, how I am fascinated by you—
how you say your breath is miracle
in the face of the galaxies I have spawned from my singular exhalation,
how you dream of exploration in the space between my stars
in some teensy quadrant that only covers what I consider my pinky,
how you ache to know me more so than your own unfathomable oceans
on your pathic blue rock and how, despite all that is logic,
I want you to succeed in your desire to sow your seeds in the pieces of me,
to infect me with your infatuation, eat me with your hunger for knowledge
to understand the laws of the Universe,
to hear you say my name with such reverence, you claim me god—
oh Human,
you stand there late at your night, and you admire me with mirroring eyes,
my glory reflected upon the kiss of your colored irises
and I am enraptured by your curiosity to outlast suffocation through my skies.
Yours,
The Universe
Known for her fun attitude and feisty poems, Anastasia Helena Fenald spends most of her free time devouring fanfiction, teaching poetry workshops, and forgetting to drink water until bedtime. When not doing poetry, she gets bullied into comedy and edits for Riot of Roses Publishing House. Her favorite constellation is the Big Dipper because it's the only one she can identify.