A castaway dream walks into an intergalactic pub.
Jagged glass,
Untouched and angry,
Plummets from the atmosphere,
Trying to stab its way inside.
The homeless dream takes off her tattered jacket,
Generated from the fabric of space and time.
She asks for a glass of ethyl formate.

The bartender drops a burning ice cube into the glass.
A little flare for the derelict dream,
The flames lash out in rebellion.
Raspberry flavor hoola hoops
Around her tongue in a seductive cry for attention.
An intoxicating aroma of rum
spins into her nostrils with a sigh.
Laced with cyanide,
She hopes,
It will end her,
Misery, but dreams are hard to kill.

Stepping into a zero-gravity bathroom,
A supermassive black hole
Is gobbling up a star,
Rapacious, it grabs the star’s twin brother,
Shooting him into its veins at hypervelocity.
Galactic cannibalism at its finest.

The dream holds its now leaking matter,
And collides into a servant of the moon –
Another person on earth is ready to house her.
Maybe her vagrant days are over.
Maybe she will stop dying.
Maybe she will achieve actualization, finally.

 

Elizabeth Bell, a finalist in this year’s Academy of American Poets Prize, is a sophomore geoscience major who was previously published in TheBurg.