“Your heart is a telescope,” I hear a man on the radio tell me. “An empty bucket for collecting light.”

It collects a lot of other things, too.

Beach trash

Pebbles with jagged edges lodged in the vena cava

Unwritten songs with a two-lined melody

Empty beer bottles

Your name and last name

Shock waves of pain whose origin is unknown

Pockets full of dust I can taste in the pores of my tongue, budding

Memories of roses and sex with substance, with stickiness that spreads on the sheets and all over our backs, in-between our thighs

“Is there space for the light?”

“Does light take up space?” I want to ask the invisible man with his soft and solid voice emitting from the blown out speakers of my beat up head.

I scratch my ear, can’t hear the frequency for the static.

Refract or reflect. Which one spells home?

Is it written in the sky or written in these bones? Coated beneath the fragility of these fingernails, neither bone nor flesh?

Can blood hold light? Can light seep through cells infused with iron and soot and smog?

Does it catch in my open mouth inhaling the humid night air with windows rolled down and June bugs singing and fog creeping, rising toward the invisible light we cannot see?

A bucket.
Does my heart have handles?

I have never known how to handle it, but many others have tried.

Carried it attached to their hip, dragged it behind on a rope, folded it across their chest with both arms, squeezing.

Can the light fall out?
Are there holes in it?

If there were I would become a sieve and let all of the pain fall through, making the holes so that nothing but light could remain. I’d make pebble sized holes and broken guitar string shaped holes. I’d punch out the unwanted debris from the storms I never wanted to survive, in the first place.

But the light. Can I keep it?

Can I focus it through these blue-green eyes? Can I see the Milky Way in these worn out irises?

Who knew flowers bloomed inside skeletons. Who knew dust from the Sahara made trees root in the Amazon. Who knew light had tentacles and thought patterns and sass.

Sassafras. Sidon. Sirius. Siphon.

My heart is an empty bucket with cheesecloth stretched tight around the edges.

But I all I want is the Light.

Just light.

Glass Beach
Ft. Bragg, California 2015