Karin Wraley Barbee: TEENAGE ASTRONOMY

Karin Wraley Barbee
TEENAGE ASTRONOMY

Men watch her from her ceiling,
Cepheus and Hercules,
pressed there by a girl
on the top bunk.
Their luminous hands
connect the dots of her
now teenage body.
The screen glows like
the Northern Lights
beneath her bedspread.
Night to night, unmoved,
she appears.
We measure the parallax.
She is further from us now.
Month to month, she brightens
and fades. Even in morning
her skin is a white light
through torn shorts.
The sun has been reduced
to a clementine.
She gathers rainbows in her room,
presses them back into the prism.
We bag it all up, the old moons,
smiling, their violet songs.
She is a projection now,
an image on paper.
She is a spot in our closed eyes,
a red flare that seems fading
but rages bright enough,
shrinking into her radiance,
her core pure power.
She is nuclear.
A hard look.
A locked door.

A native of Ohio, Karin Wraley Barbee currently teaches composition and creative writing at Siena Heights University. She lives with her two children in Adrian, Michigan. Her work has appeared in Natural Bridge, Swerve, Fjords Review, Columbia Review, The Diagram, Whiskey Island, Found Poetry Review, Glass, Sugar House Review, The Rupture, and others. More info about Karin’s work can be found at karinwraleybarbee.weebly.com.