Sunday starts at Saturday's dusk

On the day his son was born, the astronomer screamed out the window: You! This! This thing that beats the inside of our hearts? Is a beautiful curse! Know this & fling it hard enough into the air to make new charts! Shortly afterwards the astronomer realized his newborn son, his wife, & the birth all were but hallucinations, so he sat with a pot of tea & became a trapeze artist instead.
by Anis Mojgani

I found you inside a book of stars called
Sunday Starts at Saturday’s Dusk.
It was turned to a page marked “For when.”
I crumpled up my spine and became a mouse.
You were a planet.
I was the one prayer spoken
in the short little life
of a dust mite
trying to be a sword
hoping to become a twig
a constellation
or at least an answer
to somebody’s question.
I was born in the year of the swan.
My arms
were born in the year of the fish–
a corner of me was something truly spectacular.
My tongue felt like truth.
I had trouble swallowing it.
Names came from legends.
Or legends from names–
I forgot the order.
My mother wrote the origins of myth
on the inside of underpants.
I walked pantless to become closer to what I was.
I set the wheelbarrow on fire
climbed inside
and looked for a hill to ride down.
I was at the bottom of one.
I pushed the barrow up it.
Halfway up it rained.
Cussing doesn’t come from a lack of vocabulary–
I know all the other words.
None of them speak the same language that my fucking heart does.