by Arianna James
The sky is the map and the stars are
every push pin pressed inward,
every place that you’ve ever wanted to go,
ever wanted to see and disappear into
before they begin to flicker out like roman candles,
burning out,
the fizzle after a disaster.
They are places that are dying, that are breaking
and crumbling from within,
that are fractured
into a million different places
and a thousand different people—
no, you are not the city.
You are not the star.
You are already broken,
already sucked and bled dry by the ghosts
that dance on the ruins of cities,
that dance on your ruins, and laugh
at the way you sob beneath their feet.
Oh darling,
You cry so ugly.
You are an empty world,
a dying one,
except for the shadows that are painted
on the wallpaper, the ones that move and
hiss and wait for you to slip before
devouring you whole.
So maybe you are the city.
Maybe you are the star
but you are a dead one.
All that’s left of you is an echo,
the fizzle after a disaster,
the last of you finally reaching Earth and
really there isn’t much of you at all.
But the map is just a map and the sky
is just the sky and the stars are just stars
that you can’t quite see from your bedroom window.
The red and green and blue lines that streak
and twine across the continents aren’t roads
but shackles.
They loop around your wrists and neck and
hold you down so tightly that you too
sink into the porous surface of the map like an unwanted stain
You are not going anywhere anymore.
You are not the city, not the living one,
and though your vacancy sign flickers ever
onward in the dead of night,
like a motel 99 on the side of an empty highway,
you know that there is no one coming.
People pass, and some wave, but no one ever stays.
No one ever stays and it’s
just you really,
in this little shack in the middle of nowhere,
with a missing dog named Courage
It’s just you and your ghosts
and soon no one even passes by anymore
There are no more cars,
no more waves.
There are no more people,
and you have to wonder if
you too aren’t just a ghost,
a figment of your own imagination.
And just when your wondering turns into a hypothesis
A hypothesis into an experiment,
someone will speak;
the wallpaper, the drywall,
the grime beneath your fingernails,
the blood stain between your toes:
“Tell me something sweet to pass me by?”
And you always do.
