Swimming Saturn’s Rings
She slips her skin, splashes through the atmosphere.
What’s left of her body dissolves into glistening matter,
dissipates, becoming part of the surrounding circumference.
Internal organs pulse like stars in formation yet to be named.
Light years away from where she began, she surfaces,
stares at surrounding curtain of blackened sky. She wonders
what the light of celestial bodies feels like from a
distance,
mourns those confined by gravitational pull. They will
never know continuity in its purest form.
Red Sand Beach
I pretend I can breathe,
extract myself from protective coverings
necessary for travel.
33.9 million miles from home,
the distance to this temperate paradise where
I am immediately lighter,
require no anchor. I
lie
back, sink into the embrace
of blood-tinged dust, disappear into my own
imagination, my dream of diving
into waves that will never rise
on this deserted planet,
unless human hands interject, introduce
disastrous global warming effects on glacial caps.
I shudder at the thought, or possibly the fading
daylight hours. I
rise to a distorted reality,
a clear image of earth moving to take a place
in the sky that used to belong to the moon.
A.J. Huffman has published six solo chapbooks and one joint chapbook through
various small presses. Her seventh solo
chapbook will be published in October by Writing
Knights Press. She is a Pushcart
Prize nominee, and the winner of the 2012 Promise of Light Haiku Contest. Her poetry, fiction, and haiku have appeared
in hundreds of national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, Bone
Orchard, EgoPHobia, Kritya, and Offerta
Speciale, in which her work appeared in both English and Italian
translation. She is also the founding
editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press. www.kindofahurricanepress.com
