Illustration by Marina Mika
We know you only by your absence.
The hole left behind, pressed
through the drifts like something
fallen from a great distance.
Wings shorter than we would have expected,
stumpy and round as a sliced orange peel
and your body a footless bell.
Why you, a winged, flying thing
would land each time flat on your back
is a puzzle. Perhaps you were dead
long before contact, like suicides that leap
from the hundredth floor.
Perhaps you were pushed.
Clearly, you have vaporized. Heavenly
bones dissolve, asteroid-style,
in the midwinter air, and you leave
no unfurled annunciation, no pearlescent
feathers for us to find. You are only space,
a lack of something, our wish
for what you will not give.
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