Angie Macri

The galaxy hung between the girl and her mother

like a brooch in the air, smudge, haze, spiral
on a core they once knew. Her mother sat
in her chair, more lovely
than the sea. The girl was all legs
across the northeast horizon, in bed early
like the children in the city
now that the time had changed, falling
back in fall so that it got dark
early, and like the children, she wasn’t
yet sleeping, head full
of thoughts, the kind that keep a girl,
not a child or woman, up all hours. The star
called the head of the chained woman
was the same as the one called the horse’s navel, 
horse born from the beheading
of his mother, a spring
of wings before suddenly flight.
Her mother rested in her chair, looking
at the inside of her eyes.
The center of the horse connected to the girl’s mind
with all its deep space objects:
quintet, cluster,
spirals, ellipses, and a cross
in which a galaxy forms a lens
across a quasar,
gravity bending the light.
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Angie Macri is the author of Underwater Panther (Southeast Missouri State University), winner of the Cowles Poetry Book Prize, and Fear Nothing of the Future or the Past (Finishing Line). Her recent work appears in Quiddity, The Southern Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. An Arkansas Arts Council fellow, she lives in Hot Springs.