1.
I swam above the blue dust of earth, a puppet stitched with sackcloth and flax, until my orbiting body unstrung itself from the pull of gravity. Because of the heat and the condensation of ice and rock, I soon fell inward, mixing with the virgin nebula.
2.
At last the summer months gained friction and the calculations dimmed away beneath the long stretch of daylight. Already dark shapes, which you thought were birds at first but were really bats, grazed the tops of trees along the bike path. The moon shadowed us in our dreams, held us, sank into our mouths and filled us with its brimming lunacy. We could be out well past dinner, with the now-cooled pavement rough against our necks when we lay down in the cul-de-sac and gazed at the first popping stars.
3.
The sheets were still warm, and the blankets still wrapped around you, and the light that now came in through the blinds was a darker yellow, more like dying, and the motion was circumscribed to a small window of minutes in which we felt good and clear and new.
Benjamin Renne earned his MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from George Mason University under the tutelage of poets including Susan Tichy, Eric Pankey, Peter Streckfus, and Sally Keith. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in SLAB, Volition, GFT Presents: One in Four, and more.
