Aden Thomas
Monsoon 2016

*

What Those Light Years Carry
​
Only the stars know what would have come.
They cast their prophecies
across millennia and leave their blooms of light
on the fingertips of branches.
We lie in the grass and we wonder
what those light years carry
through the heaviness of dark,
the friction of our choices
gathering stardust like a comet on its way.
Inside those beams it must be still,
the sound of the universe
falling like cotton rain against the window.
We could trace all those drops of accumulation
and watch them racing down the glass
​in ways we never knew.

*

Ticket to the Partial Earth

I stole a ticket to the partial earth with you.
We knew we could go anywhere,
but chose the frozen water.
Instinct was the sheet of ice
that hardened below our skin
and separated the flow of lights
from the lathered fog of air.
We lay face down, holding hands,
looking through the frosted window.
We stared into the dark below
waiting for something we’d never seen
to swim to the surface and find us.
At night, under the moonlight,
the window became a mirror.
We saw what we’d been looking for
but couldn’t say in words,
our reflections staring back
​like they’d finally found the world.

​*

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Aden Thomas grew up in central Wyoming. His work has been featured in The Kentucky Review, The Inflectionist Review, and Turtle Island Quarterly.