Marina StarkeyI plucked my eyelashes out for you one-by-one, to the rhythm of love and love nots. The pattern fell in your palm like a new moon cycle, disappearing into the blankness of that night. Those fools had nothing to hold on to anymore anyway. But my eyelids got lonely soon; they didn’t understand why their shadows were gone. You told me it was because my eyes were not the sun. All I could do was laugh at the thought of that clumsy, dying star.
My sunless eyes understood then — the big bang was bundled behind your retina. That was the night I tried to study it all, the night I decided to love you. But it was all so silly — cosmogony is only theory. How did my limbs get tucked between yours, how did we find ourselves on your sister’s couch beneath a painting of Gandhi? That was the night he tracked all of our tiny movements. He watched how our eyes lingered so long on each other’s faces they left dust trails.
That was the night we searched for the small answers: the night we peeled our pupils back and found there was only white.
Marina is a future former Emerson College student who majored in Writing, Literature, & Publishing. While she isn’t writing poetry, she draws rosettes in lattes, updates her food blog, and plays the ukulele. Sometimes she can be found sleeping or cuddling with the handsome man her poems are about.