Ben Kline

Aurora 

Grandma asks about the layers of the atmosphere. It’s one sky, she says, her pill cup empty. Her  aide Annie vanishes before I can ask what she’d been watching on TV. That’s what I see. As a  child, I thought heaven fit the sky and ghosts lived underground, nocturnal because they feared  seraphim and the godsong of sunlight. Granny, it is one sky. I sit on her bed in the Lovesexy tank  top she would’ve scolded months before. River hills beyond the window reach into pink haze, her  knotty hand in mine. With layers our eyes can’t see. I tug her plastic white bracelet. We live in  what’s called the troposphere. She begins to speak, but wheezes, shuddering into blur, as if  sublimating, carbon to astral hydrogens. I hold my breath until I hear the ping of the help button,  until her tremor exhausts itself. Annie appears with crushed ice, a dish of melting vanilla bean, a  syringe peeking from her smock pocket. Grandma exhales. They said that’s where clouds live. I  squeeze her hand, Annie working around us. I hope the good Lord lets me see it on my way. When  it happens a week later, her electrons rush the thermosphere, ionizing somewhere over Alaska,  waves so lime the Martians try to scoop her.

Ghostbirth 

My throat cracks near the Kármán line, 

beyond the reach of woodsmen, dead 

lovers flooding my mouth’s cradle, 

a starving gull near the end of land 

my mother said would never be mine. 

She was right. I didn’t want it anyway, 

couldn’t sustain it, same as the cousins 

around my grave, like so many men 

I knew to leave but didn’t. 

The air thins, unraveling aurora 

excited by my ionized electrons, 

by Earth’s eternal urge to begin 

again, which is to ask 

who wants to live an exorcized life? 

Mom preferred the ghost life, a silence 

she continues haunt. Dad 

wanted me to stay. To till 

and timber as he grayed, 

but my atoms collided with others 

on dance floors and hook up apps, 

and now he’s there, without either of us, 

my bones unthreading in my coffin, 

joining the planet’s ongoing daydream 

to fling all of us 

off. Mom swore 

I’d never be rid of her, 

my long O going nowhere 

without air to carry it back 

to the cousins, those men. 

She waves from the exopause. 

I haven’t figured out how 

to wave back. I know 

she’s going to brag 

about showing me the way.

Another Year 

Every day resembles the first, Sol twirling me onto this elliptic pirouette so far from my siblings.  I’ve lived dizzy from temperature change and precession tilt, magma pimples, tremors with  minimal warning. I don’t mind the seas, rather enjoy their wobble and fish. I cherish jasmine and  stargazer lilies, moonflowers saying hello to Luna and me. I can’t with the humans, their noise and  lust for fire. Cutting all my hair. The polyethylene and tritium they can’t carry home. Silk roses  left by the billions. Too much Red No. 40. Their satellites smother me. I miss the borealis. Mars  says, Look how I handled it. But I think of Narcissus, one of my favorites. He understood the  trouble of scale. Few truly have since, convincing themselves otherwise. I itch under their electric  grid and microwave transmission. Their pocket-sized machines of watery sheen rendering them  weeds. I flirt with every comet who comes close enough to kiss.