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Juliet watches
her friends run and fall
in the fading light, hooting for her.
The sky
leaks to grey. Juliet doesn’t answer
although she is very afraid of the dark,
the press of it on her face,
the suffocating all aloneness.
The air flattens to black. She carefully lies back
and spooks the stars with her flashlight.
Some fly endlessly away
as if sucked by some monstrous inhale.
Some seem to sink towards her,
sparkling, soundless as moths.
She sprawls until she is pointed as a pentagon
as if her arms and legs and head could embrace
the pulsing concave lens above, her body
transmute the last warmth beneath
into some new Juliet
finally, irrevocably,
breathing on her own.
Copyright © Nancy Everett Taylor
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