Constellation Prize
Sara Aultman
The gods wanted you reborn.
You lived so beautifully, they say,
your sword sang hymns of viscera
to our prowling divinity, our throats
teethed with thirst, and deeply we
drank your prayer-song.
Breathless, softly polar,
your head limns a halo of their light prismatic,
briefly empyrean against swollen silt, you’re measured
in lengths of bloodless flesh
and thrown upwards through gilded solar forges.
A nova now your elbow, a cosmic furnace
burns your heartbeat. Speak, and comets scald
in place of molars uncalcified.
You are starscape luminescent,
canonized in night-sky,
your light-year touch unfathomable
to everyone who ever tasted your name and smiled.
Any ear that heard, that cherished, your lung-erupt laugh
would melt to know your eldritch noise,
so foreign, alien, impending as gravity, familiar only to eons.
The gods wanted praise eternal, your spectral shine
unbound by mortal years, untraced by earthly fingertips,
your larynx a searing drought of benediction.
Let your neutron knuckles pulse with envy
for the jaw-locked dirt, glow eternal.
You know the gods as graverobbers and
the universe — a glacial mausoleum.
You lived so beautifully, they say,
your sword sang hymns of viscera
to our prowling divinity, our throats
teethed with thirst, and deeply we
drank your prayer-song.
Breathless, softly polar,
your head limns a halo of their light prismatic,
briefly empyrean against swollen silt, you’re measured
in lengths of bloodless flesh
and thrown upwards through gilded solar forges.
A nova now your elbow, a cosmic furnace
burns your heartbeat. Speak, and comets scald
in place of molars uncalcified.
You are starscape luminescent,
canonized in night-sky,
your light-year touch unfathomable
to everyone who ever tasted your name and smiled.
Any ear that heard, that cherished, your lung-erupt laugh
would melt to know your eldritch noise,
so foreign, alien, impending as gravity, familiar only to eons.
The gods wanted praise eternal, your spectral shine
unbound by mortal years, untraced by earthly fingertips,
your larynx a searing drought of benediction.
Let your neutron knuckles pulse with envy
for the jaw-locked dirt, glow eternal.
You know the gods as graverobbers and
the universe — a glacial mausoleum.
Sara Aultman is a Seattle-based poet whose work has been featured in The Fiery Scribe Review, Fahmidan Journal, Olney Magazine, and HAD, as well as in the anthologies Black Stone / White Stone (Making the Machines that Destroy Us) and HELL IS REAL: A Midwest Gothic Anthology. Sara can be found on Twitter @TheSaraAult.