Christina Kallery

Our Love in the Multiverse 

 

If the astrophysicists are right, there’s a place

in which it worked. Just think: this millisecond,

 

we’re in some cosmic kitchen where I pass you 

dinner plates to dry. We sip from souvenir 

 

mugs on a darkening stoop and listen to the space 

frogs go bonkers with desire, the cascading diamond 

 

rain. We beam up a floor to our big, shared 

bed, read nestled side by side until our bodies give 

 

way to their gravitational pull. Here, we watch every 

one-star horror flick, cruise canyon roads to nowhere 

 

towns with taverns where you murmur secrets

to a jukebox so it lights up with our song. 

 

On alien campgrounds where evergreens  

grow apex down, we shiver close, count each

 

glittered tentacle of the jellyfish constellation. 

Some days, we walk for hours along a rippled 

 

shore with two moons’ worth of tides — you wield 

a metal detector while I scan for crimson sea 

 

glass in the dunes. Here — in a world where no one 

ends up sobbing by a dumpster in a Denny’s parking lot,

 

no message left on read —we grin together in an undeleted 

profile pic beside a multiversal MySpace Tom. We say all 

 

we didn’t there. No moment finally breaks us, so we spin 

away like cosmonauts unmoored from the mothership 

 

locked in solo, silent freefalls, ‘til all we see are stars. 

Christina Kallery is the author of Adult Night At Skate World, in its 2^nd edition from Dzanc Books.  Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, ONE ART, Rust & Moth and other publications, and has been included in Best of the Web and Respect: The Poetry of Detroit Music. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.