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To Drink the Night by Kristian Perez

It is night, and the cosmos is brewing.

The sky spills out in a slow drip.

It’s liquid, dark and pure, your stoup,

filled with twilight, smells of jasmine.

Foam rises like a nebula collecting

at the top into trillions of stars. Bubbles

erupting from its belly, in your glass,

is a liquor of galaxies like an astral gin.

Perhaps the stars taste like brandy.

Perhaps the night is a cocktail with

too much rum. Perhaps we are all tipsy

off the moon’s shine.

Earth’s children are all inebriated, watching

our drink churn down then float up, freezing

to form asteroids that travel free of our bodies.

With each word spoken, a star-filled hiccup

slipping out from within us. 

Maybe drinking the night would bring us closer

to Earth. The weight of the stars pressing

our toes to roots of trees that spent thousands

of years countryside, only to be hacked away

by a star-drunk lumberjack. With our ecosystems

slowly fading, while you and I are soused on space,

What are we going to do when our cup is empty?

Soon enough the stars will dry, the sober

will settle in, and we will have no choice but to

look down and see what we did to Earth.

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