I Crushed My Love Into Stardust - Poem

I used to think the Hubble was the greatest evil humanity ever built;

A weapon aimed at the untamed cosmos, 

Encroaching the male gaze further upon an innocent universe.

Was this planet on a platter not appeasement enough for their conquests? When man 

Dreamt of the stars, did he imagine woman hand-in-hand, or not at all?

I think I told you that once. Yes, I did. I remember now. 

Sitting on rotten slats of wood, eating cold pretzels, 

Drinking that crappy lemonade with so much sugar it burned. 

Pretending we didn’t hear that car backfiring, hoping it was a car backfiring. 

You told me, “It’s the eye that’s evil, not the telescope.”

I told you, “You sound like the NRA.”

You gave me that look, the way you spoke only we could hear. 

Those eyes like a viewport, previews of colors I’d never seen and noises I couldn’t make.

That was the same day I punched your dad in the face. 

It was like watching a car and a bicycle collide, one crumpling before the horrors of 

Industrialization, tons of pillaged parts from peoples whose languages lay buried under a 

Combination gas station convenience store.

You hated me for trying that, but only because it was a lost cause. 

If thirty years of piss beer and legal fees couldn’t bash his skull in, 

I wasn’t going to do it. I never told you my nose was broken, 

Because you’d feel awful for pressing against it when you kissed me.

You would’ve hated the dress you wore at your funeral.

You always wore suits, old dress pants frayed and painted with mud stains at the hem.

The blush on your face is like a foreign invader, forcing itself upon the sinew

You used to bear. What part of that frilled black dress marks the final clothes

Of a young woman who wore overalls a size too big to catch frogs in the rain?

How does the perfectly curated rose lodged between your still hands reflect

The gritty mitts that tinkered on an old dodge abandoned in a cold lot?

The photo they used for your service; none of them know that you snuck 

Away after it was taken, meeting me at the railway bridge over route 5

Where I held you and promised that at our wedding, we would wear 

Platform shoes and cheap leggings left in the dumpster by the boardwalk.

My hands twitch, as if my brain fires all neurons at once in a creeping barrage.

The chatter around your open casket would have overstimulated you. 

I wish I had brought those knockoff sony headphones you liked

To stride up to your display case and place them over your ears as a queen bears her crown.

Then you wouldn’t hear your aunt tell the crowd that you dreamed of being a doctor;

The fake answer you always gave. I’m the only person left in this universe that knows

You wanted to be an electrical engineer. I know it will die with me.

I haven’t cut my hair since the funeral, my casually cut guise splintered

Without your fingers to fly across my scalp like piano keys, playing a waltz.

Flaky metal, brown like maggots, strikes wood. An hour of digging in the

Gelid rain, undoing the work of disinterested men with a shovel I stole from your dad.

An incision six feet deep, revealing a keel of wood left undisturbed for months.

It’s that rotten wood from our boardwalk, and like our boardwalk it’s being torn down.

I recognize you better now than the mannequin touched up at your wake.

You’re a puzzle with 206 pieces, dressed in clothes you never wore like a children’s doll 

As if to grab you by the waist and let imagination bring you to life. 

Only now, you’d snap at the middle and be tossed back in the bargain bin 

By a child who can’t imagine with a broken toy.

But we were never children, were we?

I raise my boot as to smash an insect, tongue singed by that sugary lemonade 

And the absence of self. Your skull breaks like a fallen vase, beneath combat boots you bought

For my birthday. Chipped fragments scattering like stardust.

A woman scorned, foot crashing down as a gavel. 

Down. 

Down. 

Down.

The shovel would be quicker, but it trapped you here in the first place. It cannot set you free.

When our cities are buried under rubble and folly, and the next men crawl out from the sea like

Baby turtles, they won’t dig up your body. They won’t display you in a museum 

With a cheap plastic plaque, held in glass covered by grubby fingerprints. 

They won’t study you in a dusty room, putting your puzzle back together 

To satisfy their curiosity and ego when they lift you just above

The ground and play pretend with your life. 

I lift my boot, and examine the fine calcium dust you’ve been crushed into. 

The Hubble will never see what’s left of you; the earthly visage of twinkling stars.