Callisto

by LE Francis

It’s fitting that the face which takes the most punches
is the face that haunts your dreams. A vision
made & remade at the business end of a comet —
rather several. Likely hundreds. Thousands even. I’ve lost
count of all the times my senses left me, all the times
I wondered why I didn’t fall apart — atom
by atom, melting back into the bones of spacetime.
& shouldn’t you be marveling at how much remains?

& how much has been bled from me? Buckets
of jeweled light chewing through my lip,
spinning oblivion into dream upon dream,
upon dream. & isn’t it more reasonable
to think I’ve taken too many hits to be due
many more? To delude myself out of believing
that I have a face that even heaven can’t love?
What’s another hit, anyhow? I’ll let it smolder,

let gods & writers lay worlds over my wounds.
We all dream. Even I, who has been everything
but obliterated. & still there is a way to be new
for their eyes, to be beautiful when their gaze drifts
back, eventually. & together we will translate the lines
& stanzas of my devastation. Together, we will glimpse
the future in my suffering — civilization like scar tissue,
street signs blooming from the broken ground like irises.

Together we will bend all visible light,
we will transmute all manifest perception.
& I will once again convince the spiteful hand
of god to loosen its fist & take up a pen.

LE Francis (she/her) is a writer, visual artist, & musician living in the pacific northwest. She is a former arts journalist & co-EIC of Sage Cigarettes Magazine. She plays bass in the indie/prog project Hands Above Stars. Find her online at nocturnical.com.

• @n0cturnical