Love Letter to Galileo: Axis

I write to you because it’s night, because the domed
planetarium glows from the edge of our city,

a moon plunked to the ground
hollow as a whole note. This is our song,

astronomer, tangled in your ecstatic beard,
hands flailing around your face

as you theorize about rotation
and speed. I love the way your name

falls, slow confetti from my tongue.
Our mouths imitate the speed of light,

the way stars taste, though with light
pollution, I can’t make out constellations.

I heard meteors fell Saturday night, trailing arcs
across the sky. I want to know

their music, what you really muttered
when they forced you to recant it.

I want to show you the yellow pear tomatoes
I planted last summer, how they glow

against the vines like misshapen suns.
Show me the axis one more time—

I can feel us spinning.

ABOUT THE POET

Stacey Balkun is the author of Sweetbitter & co-editor of Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Poetry. Winner of the 2019 New South Writing Contest as well as Terrain.org’s 10th Annual Contest, her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2018, Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, & several other anthologies & journals. Stacey holds an MFA from Fresno State and teaches creative writing online at The Poetry Barn & The Loft.

ABOUT THE COVER

The cover is a recoloring of a vintage drawing by E. L. Trouvelot: “The November Meteors: As observed between midnight and 5 o’clock A.M. on the night of November 23-24 1868,” from the New York Public Library’s Rare Book Division.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Work from this micro chapbook first appeared in Sky+Sea (Porkbelly Press, 2015), Muzzle, Bodega, and Event Horizon.