My name is Podra Gudumma and when I was 13 I wrote a love poem to the stars.

I showed it to my English teacher and she said no you can't be in love with the stars.

You have to be in love with the person and she'd gone through with a red pen and corrected the entire poem.

And I went back and undead all of her corrections because for me being in love with the stars,

being in love with the unknowability of the universe was a way of feeling at the edge of myself

or feeling tiny in the face of the unknown and for me that edge was like the edge of being alive.

December morning in the desert by Alberto Rios.

The morning is clouded and the birds are hunched more cold than hungry, more numb than loud.

This crisp Arizona shore where desert meets the coming edge of the winter world.

It is a cold news and star announcement.

The myriad stars making bright the black as if the sky itself had been snowed upon.

But the stars, all those stars, where does the shore noise of their hard work go?

These plugs sparking the motor of an otherwise quiet sky.

They're flickering work everywhere in a white vastness.

We should hear the stars as a great roar gathered from the moving of their billion parts.

This great hot rod scared of the Milky Way across the asphalt night.

The assembled moving glints and far-floating embers risen from the hearth fires of so many other worlds.

Where does the noise of it all go if not into the ears, then hearts of the birds all around us?

Their hearts beating so fast and their equally fast wings and high songs.

And the bees too with their lumbering home and the birds.

And the wasps and moths, the bats, the dragonflies.

None of them sure if any of this is going to work this universe.

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