I nose dive off moon craters into pockets of black holes,
siphon stars & collect them in tear ducts & the bends
of elbows. I am hollowed & holy, a mess of molecules
& light skirting the corners of my lips to the underside
of my fingernails. Watch me pluck Saturn’s rings, wear
them as bangles. They’ll clink & chime against one another
echoing between ribs. Last night I strung Jupiter’s moons
into a pearl necklace & swallowed it whole. Listen to the
way they pinball around my body, settling between shoulder
sockets & spinal shifts. Tomorrow, I’ll weave earrings
from the Northern Lights. How I’ve always loved their milky
emeralds, watercolor wisps like loose ribbon pulled
across the horizon. Everything vibrates when I’m like this,
humming lips pressed to my neck, & the floor splits open,
showing me god or a field of marigolds or my mother’s arms
& I let myself fall, descending like Icarus all caught up
in the way my feathers glimmer with wax & sunlight—
I am warm & awake & reaching, an apocalypse brimming
on my wingtips.
–
Jessica Nirvana Ram is an Indo-Guyanese poet and essayist. She is the 2022-23 Stadler Fellow in Literary Arts Administration. Jessica earned her MFA at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and received her B.A. from Susquehanna University. Her work—about inheritance, expectations, and radical self-love—appears in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Hayden’s Ferry Review, HAD, and Honey Literary, among others. Jessica is a Pushcart nominee and currently a poetry reader at Okay Donkey Mag. Find her @jessnirvanapoet on Twitter.