Cosmology with Self-Ascending by Mary Helen Callier

The morning of my birth, the mill beside the hospital burned.

My father was standing at home 

by a window, watching the horizon, his daughter 

dying. So many small deaths have happened already. 

I tried my best to touch you, 

you didn’t want to be touched. 

C says the heart spins

like a rogue planet. Numerous,

numinous. The rogue planet flies

outside our solar system. A surface swept

by constant storms. A surface where it always rains

liquid metal in the dark and there is no light

to cling to. Once, I was small. I loved

x-rays, bad-weather. The months I spent

inside sterilized rooms. 

There are places even the heart cannot get to. 

They vibrate with the loneliness

of objects trapped inside museums.

And the maned wolf lives

with its one distant lover, contiguous 

territories meet 

once a year. Maybe I am simply not

the subject of a star. These days

I’d take anyone’s hands      

I don’t care how cold

or scientific. 

Mary Helen Callier’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Bennington Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. She is currently a doctoral student in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver, where she serves as one of the poetry editors for the Denver Quarterly. Her debut collection, When the Horses, is forthcoming with Alice James Books (2025).

22 April 2024