eat well and grow big. I will gather matter
from black holes like spools of dense
honey, thrash my now non-Euclidean limbed body
to We Didn’t Start the Fire by Billy Joel.
outside the foreign oblong window, look: this
galactic neighborhood is ours to explore. when
trying to see your face, all there is in the reflection
of your space helmet is
night giving
way to night.
see? the end of the world isn’t really the end
of the world, it’s just refracted or lost light & the
searching of other worlds. you will come to miss the
residue of the last earth summer on skin, sun cracking open like an
orange yolk to blink slowly down on
us. when summer doesn’t exist,
remembering it is as easy as holding water.
it was said there are places in people’s homes
they never truly belonged to. maybe in a higher dimension
or through warped space-time
it could be different.
but all of that is
for the end of the world. when it comes,
we’ll be just fine. you laugh
at the sci-fi books that believe we’ll someday
resurface from the bright muddy dredges of black holes, collectively
holding pearly mollusks of peace within the mittens of our newest
lightspeed propulsion suits. yet peace is not found
but created. remember that
in these small hands I hold not solutions but seeds. during summertime,
I pick and salt the growing plums in the backyard to eat
on rice for later. the gentle thrum of cicadas sweeps over us
like wind. I consider squishing an ant under
my shoe but let it go after the freshwater spray from
the stream near your house dots our cheeks like constellations.
as the faint wave crashes
down on sand again, nudging
pebbles loose into its tide, I think of humans: taking and
always taking, for scientific advancement or simply to take. one
day Mars or Europa will not be enough. Earth is already not
enough. if reaching new worlds means reaching
the end of ours, I’m content staying here,
where light
gives way
to light.
—
Noa Kizhnerman is a student from New York City. She has been recognized by the Japan Society of London, the tide rises, the tide falls, and Poets for Science, among other organizations.
