For Kepler 138b (the beautiful)

By mica woods

if you took a telescope to the sky
200 lightyears away

happened to point it down on
this country, would you see the slaughter

and the selling by those men
we carry memories of in our pockets

or would you not notice the labor
in the fields as different from

the digging crews of the Eerie Canal
can you measure the mass

of suffering from your red dwarf
by detecting the wobble

in Mars as we pass nearby
or the light we block from the sun

could you see what freedom
has meant in its scabbed-over cloth

how we could set a scale and weigh
a heart / or body / i’m sorry

you had to see us on our birthday
with sweat and lashes and mounds

of scars, burning villages / massacres
200 years ago but if you could

see us now—no cover-up no / blush
would you say we look

like an old lover
and we haven’t aged a day

mica woods used to live with a family of raccoons in Missouri, but currently they edit the Columbia Poetry Review and teach at Columbia College Chicago as an MFA candidate. In 2015, they received the Merrill Moore Prize for Poetry from Vanderbilt University. Other recent poems can be found in Pretty Owl Poetry, The New Territory, Hollow Literary Journal, and Heavy Feather Review.

Image credit: Danielle Futselaar via a Creative Commons license.