Zeta

How the universe began is a rhetorical question, a function or formula. It hangs off the New Moon after coming back, decades after circling Saturn, transforming, restructuring.

I pretend to count your eyelashes, each one its own universe. Somewhere, with child-like wonder, I’m counting the veins on a leaf, counting the spots in my eyes, hoping for parallelism and connection.

In all capital letters, I ask, and the questions always come back--return to sender. That’s the center of romance. The center isn’t the heart; it’s the lungs. It’s the breath it takes to ask, to aggressively strum the vocal chords.

The number of veins is twenty-five. The number of spots is forty-three. In my throat, the answers bloom, and I trace them to Jupiter, where they separate into two paths of philosophy--to move forward or backward, the feature of balance.