The Light Where We Loved is Still Out There: A Plea

JAY STEWART ANDERSON

When waking in darkness wrapped in sheets,
trapped with secret electricity ticking under
my chin, I find myself lamenting lost light—

knowing someone lived and died in a cave
on a done, broken world a dozen billion years ago,
glowing within alien rock, then gone.

Gone—as so many fist-sized diamonds before,
shaped in pressure, biding ageless, cracked
in violence. Never known. Never seen.

Now that cave is a womb, cradled kisses making
a closet with private sky where wounded kites fly
themselves in rose-colored clouds. No one sees.

Now that cave is my bedroom, your bedroom—
a cube of gray light absorbed on walls, gone then out
with the lamp. Love whispers no one hears. No one sees.

Now that cave is our skulls—more stars than a universe
twinkle blink still yearning, dream of hunger filled in sun.
Two skulls, two universes nuzzled under a warm void. No one sees.

Now that cave is our basement, walls chiseled shaking
in desperate verse please preserve the words so some far
digging eyes might see, might know, might care. No one sees.

Now that cave—the closed fires of a crematorium reducing
bent fingers to ash clutching some token of affection still
living in the space where light cannot go. No one sees the fire.

All hidden from night skies empty with the triumph of space
over spirit—no one and nothing laments that lost light which sparks
as an itch of stars behind my eyelids, bright and brief, then gone.

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Jay Stewart Anderson is a queer writer living in central Ohio. He is currently a creative writing student at The Ohio State University, and his work can be found or is forthcoming in The Banyan Review, Inverted Syntax, and HOOT.