Sara Amis

ASTRAEA

I caught up with her in a field of stars
bursting open like flowers, coronas
of dust and vaporized planets arrayed
like petals, yellow, orange, and blue.

This is only true close up; if you leave,
going faster than light, they collapse back
into their former selves, star-buds shining
in a deep frigid meadow of silence.

"Mother," she said. I knew that wasn't true.
I have no daughter.

Still the stars reflected in her shining
black hair, her skin and her deep eyes. Perhaps
if I look over my shoulder, outrun
light, I will know from what garden she came.

Sara Amis holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Georgia and currently resides in Atlanta. She won the 2007 Mangrove Review award for creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Magpie Magazine, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Jabberwocky 3 and 5, Datura, Moon Milk Review, NonBinary Review, and the feminist speculative poetry anthology The Moment of Change. Her poem series The Sophia Leaves Text Messages was published by Papaveria Press September 2009, and she has an experimental poetry project on Twitter.com titled "The Traveling Bobcat Poetry Show." She likes to wander from genre to genre with blithe abandon.