Heaven’s Brightest Star
By Arlo Castilan
Every night, I find my neck craned upwards.
With my telescope propped up before my feet, my eyes looked for you
Scanning the open sky with a desperate beating in my chest.
At long last, I found you.
I watched how you glimmered and flickered through the lens of my
glasses,
The horrid prescription opening the gate to your beauty
And I laid down on the blades of grass that pierced through my shirt
and crumpled against my back
And I imagined their sharpened spines were your flares.
I yearned to hold and touch you, to feel you burn off my
fingerprints and blister up my skin,
But I knew that from where I stood
I could not be hurt by your intimacy.
And I hated it.
Sometimes, you would be too hard to find through my telescope
I often found it much easier to pick you out from afar.
I would look for you in every constellation,
Not knowing where you were until my breath would stop
And my soul would reach to greet you.
Sometimes I envy the fact that my heart finds you first.
I left my telescope behind.
I appreciated the work it had done for me
Though I found it quite useless in the skill of searching for you.
But I found you were no longer in my skies
The smog of the city burdening my breath
And your name now a useless taste in my mouth.
I called for you and searched for your radiance and prayed that you
Would be sent from above
But when I realized you could not descend into my palms
They gripped the rungs of Heaven’s ladder instead.
Oh, how I reached! How my fingers seared and bled
And my feet burned from your fire
The skin boiling and peeling to give way to my flesh
So the innermost parts of me could be held by you too
Brightened star, I need no telescope
For I will meet you in the sky.
The Trinity Review 