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.