E.B. Schnepp | Heavenly Bodies | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

March 2018
Ohio Poets

E.B. Schnepp

Heavenly Bodies

My body is an island, my body breathes without me, taking in things other than oxygen, my body is infinite, my body doesn't need me though I spend my nights on steel, inspecting myself with a microscope, learning my micro-universes; nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon bonds, atoms to quarks, I follow myself into dark matter to where the ink runs from the corners of the universe, drops off the edge — contrary to popular belief there is an edge. The universe expands out toward extinction, a billion-billion galaxies already tipped over the side; we had to invent a word for what it means to be devoured, combined again as a fresh creation, extraordinary on the other side. After the last supernova we couldn't stomach it, the black, the way the moon too was drifting away, panicked we began shooting amputated limbs, phantom organs past the stratosphere — some dead man once said we were star stuff, we hoped it was true enough that up there we would glow, fodder-fill void, lighting paths home to the parallel universes you scratched off in your sleep. I'd slip from between your sheets, dig them out from under the bed, the sofa, from between dust bunny teeth, let them drop back under your skin as if I couldn't love you without them — did you notice? It always comes back to this, to us, to bodies, to the way we can only define our universe in terms of skin. The earth has one too, an atmosphere scorching anything that tries to break through. Nothing is supposed to go out, or come in, yet it finds itself constantly penetrated by meteor showers, satellites, bipedal parasites in shiny chrome cans shooting themselves at the dark matter, wondering if we really aren't the center of the universe; science says maybe we are, the universe.

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