Suze Kay

The Starlink array arcing over my slice of night
is also a freight train of light, is also a string of pearls,
is also the end of the sky as I know it – 
uncluttered and unchanged since man first
left his cave, looked up and found himself 
in a cluster of stars that looked like a hunter.
Just like him, just like everyone he knew.
That, I’ll get over. It’s not like I can name 
anything up there without an app to guide me.
I’m not proud to confess I only look up
for something new: a meteor shower, 
the blinking drift of an airplane,
a cloud shaped like a woman birthing the moon. 
Here then gone, special only because I saw it,
named it and watched it go. 

It’s a sign, right? I’m two days out from the city
in 2020 and terrified I brought a cough with me.
I believe the sky is telling me I didn’t, but also
death is just a door, and also I am more than
a cursor moving through the dark. These satellites 
are a lightspeed promise to keyboard hunters
like me, like everyone I know – something will 
remain, even if its tidy line abstracts and no eye
remains to map it out. The next time they come
around, I won’t even know. I don’t have that app. 
In two weeks, a storm will come. The lights will
flicker and in those dark seconds I’ll believe
the world is ending. And in another two weeks,
I’ll watch a lamb be born on a neighbor’s farm
and believe it’s just beginning. 

Suze Kay is a pastry chef in New Jersey by day and a writer whenever the oven’s off. Her work has been published in RHP Press and Ginger Bug Press, and she was awarded first place for Science Fiction in the 2023 Vocal Writing Awards. She loves liminal spaces, one song on repeat, and her little gray cat, Aura. You can find her on Twitter @suz_chef.