By: Hannah Cajandig-Taylor
It is difficult to pinpoint a stable point in the universe. People seem surprised by this; that the motion of bodies is only relative, is only subjective. The distance expands. We stop moving each other. Time forgets to be linear. Halley’s Comet hasn’t ripped the dark in two since 1986. She missed The Princess Bride and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Nobody knew how to dirty dance or take Prozac, but at least Halley left before the Chernobyl explosion.
While the world and I spin out together, the universe moves me, but if I wrote a love letter she’d burn it against her mouth. Halley doesn’t know my sister is named for her. She doesn’t watch me on Fridays, throwing terms like parallax or quasar to fill an empty screen. This is nothing but an illusion, launching through the world wide web of
wouldn’t it be something see a chainsaw in zero gravity / how much can the world change in 76 years / would you want to miss any of it / do you wish the absence of bodies meant something too
Halley missed the year I crashed my car, the same year I spent two hours rinsing dried blood out of my pillowcase after dicing my skin like a tomato. My scars look more like comet trails now. I could not be moved in 1986 because I did not exist. This becomes a familiar story; comet becomes transitory, then becomes beautiful / but beautiful things indicate disaster is on the way, so it ends like you would expect it to.
Hannah Cajandig-Taylor resides in the stunning Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where she is an MFA Candidate at Northern Michigan University and an Associate Editor for Passages North. Her prose and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Snapdragon, Tulane Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, Drunk Monkeys, Helen Literary Magazine, and Rising Phoenix Press, among others.
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