Constellation

by Colten Dom

My hands turn to your back like

tonight’s sky, gleaming 

somewhere in an ancestral skull

revealed by a retreating glacier—

reconvened after a cloudy evening,

squinting, kneading familiar structures,

lines of gravity placing each stain

as I find it.

Freckles metastasize; stars pull and

are themselves pulled.

You touch my skin to

assign texture—pink-amber like

boiling syrup—the furred places

you bury your nose.

Do you see riders, belts, gods?

Waypoint divinities—or have

those charts faded to ruin?

Each library redrafts heaven;

ply the waters and yank free

from our nighttime, massaging

constellations clean of curse,

counting the moles

penned by that senseless author sun.

In future, your freckles will

decompose

into a raincloud—fragments

of skin turning to stone ’til

we map one another again

on canvas sheets. For now,

I look upon your back and think,

What a terrific yawn!

What a gorgeous sneeze!

Starry Night Yosemite

by Lawrence Bridges

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Colten Dom is a graduate of the University of Victoria Writing Program. His fiction has appeared internationally in magazines and journals such as This Side of West, filling Station, The Missouri Review, Broken Pencil magazine, CIRQUE, and the Mid-American Review.

Lawrence Bridges is best known for work in the film and literary world. His photographs have recently appeared in the Las Laguna Art Gallery 2023, Humana Obscura, the London Photo Festival, Light Space & Time Art Gallery, and the ENSO Art Gallery in Malibu, California. He created a series of literary documentaries for the National Endowment for the Arts “Big Read” initiative, which includes profiles of Ray Bradbury, Amy Tan, Tobias Wolff, and Cynthia Ozick. He lives in Los Angeles. You can find him on IG: @larrybridges