stars melt in your skin

for R.M

quiet nights held inside your hands like water waiting
for the chance to become your ladder.

you first reminisced, as if maybe certain musings
you’d want to hold out for again, buying yourself more time.

how could I have fully known that you were planning
a one-way trip to winter?

survivor’s guilt for me mostly
feels like I’m glued to the stage
in the spotlight, unable to look
any audience member in the eyes. Nor
can I muster up a ballad for the
microphone. without you, my friend,
every thursday afternoon in that
first floor art classroom was ever so
lonesome. where you are now, stars
melt in your skin, illuminating all
corners of this world, and the next.

the rewind button on this remote won’t bring you
back to the physical like I thought it would.

I miss you, come back home. maybe we
could have a beer and laugh ‘round the campfire, in the woods.

WHISPERS OF THE TIDES

The present breaks through
the clearing I’ve made, out of everything
and nothing.

‘Though I’ve stood here resolutely, always, I’d
erred for the comfort of longing for a future unpromised,
and a past with shallow breath.

What are now but faded memories, I begged to cling to life,
for a little longer.

I promise I won’t drown a second time,

I know you’ve gotta go,
I know you’ve gotta go.

The future, justified, owes me nothing,
but for my heart, oh, let a preemptive pardon
clear anyway.

Everything else is rooted,
I’ll try to be okay.

Tony Nicholas Clark (he/him) is a black, trans writer from Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in Short Edition, Soundings East, Epiphany Magazine, and others. He holds an M.A in English & M.F.A in Creative Writing from Monmouth University. Tony was a 2024 Poet-Author Fellow at the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing.

Featured image in this post is “VISTA’s infrared view of the Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8),” ESO/VVV, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons