NATURE POEM
from Nature Poem
When a star dies, it becomes any number of things
like a black hole, or a documentary.
The early universe of our skin was remarkably smooth
now I stand in a rapidly dampening Christina Aguilera tee
The first stars were born of a gravity, my ancestors—
our sky is really the only thing same for me as it was for them,
which is a pretty stellar inheritance
I don’t know how they made sense of that swell, how they survived long enough to make me, and am sort of at war with sentimentality, generally
but that absence of an answer, yet suggestion of meaning
isn’t ultimately that different from a poem
So I’ve started reading the stars
Nothing is possible until it happens, like digesting sulfur instead of sunlight
or friends with benefits
Poems were my scripture and the poets, my gods
but even gods I mean especially gods are subject to the artifice
of humanity.
I look up at the poem, all of them up there in the hot sky and fall
into the water, a stone
.
.
Tommy “Teebs” Pico was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural fellow, 2013 Lambda Literary fellow in poetry, and has poems in BOMB, Guernica, and the Offing. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn and with Morgan Parker co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA). @heyteebs
