constellation ovenbird I was at a wedding eating the best filet_mignon my tongue had ever touched when your name came up, leaving the lips of a man I had never met before who knew you a lifetime ago in the hazy days after high_school. I said that I had also known you once, briefly. But whatever friendship we might have had dissolved like the tape that holds the only images of us standing in the same place at the same time. The man said your name and a memory flickered and some pocket of the universe flipped inside-out letting all the loose_change of a thousand possible futures go rolling along the floor. I scooped up a shiny quarter on its way to a dark crack in the floorboards, one cent for every year that had passed since I shot you with a cap_gun in the driveway of a boy who would break my heart. And as I tucked that dazzling coin into my palm I felt the jolt of an unexpected juncture. Time collapsed. I woke to a rain drenched morning, slick with the sound of your voice, singing. And I felt, in the prismatic fracture of the day’s light, a bird fluttering in my throat, and a trembling arpeggio of notes rising to meet yours. I heard the sound of pocket change hitting the floor, ringing out like bells and we danced at the prom we never attended and lived our lives backwards until we had tried on every iteration of what might have been. And when time began to run forward again, and the sun resumed its westward progression, I found your voice tucked into the folds of every newborn day. I sang. And my voice made shapes it had never made before and the universe said, “Here, I think you dropped this years ago,” and pressed a cold quarter into the curve of my hand, and the sky turned red as the sun slept and ink ran red from my pen and stained my fingertips and when I heard you say my name for the first time two pieces of silver fell from my eyes and I was alive, so alive in the sound of you calling me home. 251011 what's it to you? who go blather from