Letter to the Daughter I Don’t Have [Celestial]
2 Minutes Read Time
Assistant Editor Blessing Christopher: The past, present, and future coalesce in today’s micro, resulting in a prose poem that makes tangible a quiet but insistent sense of longing.
Listen to Whitney Waters read the piece:
Letter to the Daughter I Don’t Have [Celestial]
If it’s true that time is infinite, then somewhere you exist. I wonder all the time if I would recognize you, but then I open my mouth and there you are. If I open it wide enough, it becomes a black hole that swallows all matter. Your name—the secret name I call you—swims to the surface. It means golden one, and that is how I find you, polished, idol-heavy, a woman on the shore. You, sifting sand through your slender fingers. You, walking the coastline until you become indistinguishable from flotsam. Here is a game I play with myself: Count the number of unlived-in rooms until I fall asleep. I’m asleep before 100 if I count slowly enough, if I imagine the color and texture of each. One, sage green, satin. Another, feathered ocher. Yours with a lamp that splashes likenesses of stars and moons across the walls. Last night, a strawberry moon, full. Tonight, the moon is a tangerine. Its juices drip down my chin. I am ravenous, starstruck. I imagine you as a glowing inside my belly, a lantern I can carry into another night. There are so many nights to choose from, so many unlit paths to get there. You’ve taught me that everything is more beautiful when seen from a distance and once it’s possible to walk away.
