After the meeting, I say nothing to her, to him,
take April, pull her to my room.
She starts to ask me what I saw.
I shake my head, say let’s just play.
Mancala. All those bright jewels
in all those shallow holes. One. Plunk. Two.
Hear them talking outside the room:
Dad wants to come in,
Mom tells him to give us time.
We do homework.
Help April with hers,
try to do mine.
My Astronomy textbook defines
absolute magnitudes as:
a scale for measuring the actual brightness of a celestial object
without accounting for the distance of that object.
If you get too close,
you might find
the actual brightness of something
can make you go blind.
Sirens go off,
cars on the Henry Hudson never stop,
all those tiny people
in their tiny cars,
driving around their tiny lives.
Brown smog parading
as a night sky.