Waxwing Literary Journal: American writers & international voices.

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Feather

Monica Ong

Image: a scanned page from a book which reads: Feather. Primal fire burns on feathered bone. Ink blot patterns hand over a milk-strewn sky, streaked with vanished stars. Crickets sing you deep into the purpled dark, the vaulted doors of open eyes crack wide. Come. Nestle in the kinship of our gorgeous insignificance. Take comfort in

Then there’s a black circle, with Region of Nebulae written on the top, and again on the bottom, and Galaxy or Region of Stars written over a misty grey middle, Fig. 32. written below.

Then the text continues: knowing that this year is but a blink in the breath of trees and cosmic moss, that the nebulae (Fig. 32) with all its dust hardly noticed how the phone slowly died, how you burned the faulty maps to your forefather’s graves, turning your gaze toward unborn cities.

These wounds won’t outlive Jupiter’s red eye, its stare fixed on a three hundred year storm. To look is to choose. To see, to sea the primordial stew of trial and error and error and error. Cosmonauts wear loneliness like a bear’s back against the night, softly. The exoplanets have no sympathy; they’ve been at it for years.

You float yourself over this tiny dot, aglow in its mobile blueing. Glimmer the sweet dusk of amber with its powdered resin in your nose. Maybe we can speak again.

about the author

Monica Ong

Monica Ong is the author of Silent Anatomies (2015), selected by Joy Harjo as winner of the Kore Press First Book Award in poetry. An MFA graduate in Digital Media at the Rhode Island School of Design, she has also been awarded fellowships at Kundiman, Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Based in Connecticut, she currently serves as the User Experience Designer at the Yale Digital Humanities Lab.

Other works by Monica Ong

Syzygy
Woman's Place in the Universe