The Feeling of Being Stuck on Earth
The feeling of being stuck on Earth comes
when I see a shooting star and you don’t.
Somewhere in the Atlantic, those stars
watch ashes float inside a wine bottle,
deliver themselves to a fisherman,
or a young girl thinking how
a single pine cone can kill you,
simply by falling from the sky
I want to know: Are we the message
in the bottle, or are we the bottle?
The light, the dark, the empty space,
or perhaps, we are the hands
the bottle slips through.
I wonder then: did you ever play
Rochambeau with a tree, counting
her rings with I-love-yous and I-love-you-nots,
tapping on her branches just to see
who might tap back? I think it’s you
knocking on the walls
in my childhood hallway. I think it’s me
trying to tell you
why you really left home.
Now I have to ask: How are you so sure
you are on the right side of the glass?
Could you find your way home
without knowing its name?
Imagine this pilgrimage differently then:
as light traveling home where home is
the solve-for-y variable, or light
trapped in a bottle where the bottle
pretends to be home.
I see it as light pushing
against glass, your eyes like beautiful
currents carrying the stars on and on.
I see it as living and dying and aren’t you
tired of looking up at the sky?
The living are always doing this: handing out photographs,
writing down words, pressing play then pause then play again.
The dying are only dying once, yet
you keep asking them to remember
time as if time is a single moment,
as if their lives are not sheet-covered
furniture stored in a secret room.
Don’t you see? We are just one dark hour,
stretching our arms, stubbing our toes
on the corners of the couch. We are
housebound, peering out tiny windows,
waiting for the other curtain, squinting
at the light when it finally pours in.
By: AnneMarie Miles
AnneMarie Miles has a BA in creative writing and an AA in psychology. Her poems have been published in a few places, including Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Lucky Jefferson, The Concrete Desert Review, and Allegory Ridge. Her short story “Cerulean” won a small contest once, and she’ll never forget it. She feels most alive when dancing choregraphed dances in a room full of strangers.