1/25/12

Why I will Never Name a Star after Her
By Matthew Dexter


The astronomy teacher scratches her thumbnail against my neck, massages the moles that must feel like asteroids, the infected pimple a flaming comet; she prepares to take my virginity in the space where a man was murdered. The victim’s name is tattooed on her hip. She wears the gunman’s clothes, sleeps with him, and refuses to wash them.

She just turned twenty-three. I’m fourteen and this is the last day of the semester and we’re sitting in this igloo we just built as she grinds her ice axe against the gnomon of the sundial.

I could have told someone, confronted the employee at Home Depot who stood in the shadows of the dog houses.

We are embraced by snowfall. It burns and then the roof caves in. The ice buries us beyond our lips. We have to dig each other out. Hobble away in opposite directions, the strawberry polish embedded in my shoulders.

Concussed, the constellations are unimpressed. That orbit out of line, the madman inside of me nothing more than a hermaphrodite with a great surgeon.

That night a star fell from the sky in Somalia as pirates smoked amphetamines we watched it gliding toward some moonless unknown horizon. How can we measure its mass?

Sunday morning church bells still ring, young teachers will be abusing powers, wars will be waged in the name of science, students will be deflowered, and I will be a woman.


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Matthew Dexter lives in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Like nomadic Pericú, he survives on a hunter-gatherer subsistence diet.