NEWBORN STARS

In the fall of ninth grade,

Mom left a note saying she’d gone

to Italy for a while, to study.

Mom left,

April wept,

Dad cooked,

I smashed one of her glass fish.

Buried it in the back of my closet:

mouth open,

gasping for water,

drowning in a corner, dark as sea.

Day after,

Dad held a family meeting,

April held a glass frog,

I said I didn’t care that she left—

she was hardly here anyway.

After the meeting,

April stuck next to me.

I stacked my sweaters like Pez candy:

pink, purple, gray.

Assembling order from mess.

That weekend,

Chloe and I got fake IDs,

so easy

it surprised me.

I never drank,

just followed Chloe into bars,

poured my Sprite into her vodka

while she

looked the other way.

Took fake puffs from cigs

newly sprouted from her fingertips.

Newborn stars

take millions of years to form,

billions of tons of mass to make.

But the constellation of a family

can shift shape

in seconds.