Jupiter

She was everything.

She was Jupiter dripping on Mars,

a kaleidoscope shattering under bare, undeterred, dirty feet.

She had been thin and so so tired

and when life came for her

in the swift uptake of currents both oceanic and electrical--

dangerous,

opposing--

she drowned in her own blood,

the breathe stolen from her lungs

when he stabbed her

and left her lying there for her children to find.

she was gone,

swallowed whole by the gawking mouth of the electric

minds that bound her heart and soul

to the very crumbling earth where she had stood.

And even today her face in that moment

remains a blur among a hyper-sharpened picture,

a charcoal smudge on an otherwise immaculate drawing.

Her face is not her face because all I can remember is how she looked

in those last months--not herself,

features twisted with fear and pain.

She would hate being portrayed that way so

my fingers are restlessly trying to sketch her,

drawing on deities and demons and pixels and

never quite reaching the nirvana that composed her,

made her real.

My fingers are dancing, always singing please please please

and then not right not right as they stutter into silence.

She is almost too bright to remember, blinding,

so I have stopped trying to coax the memories

with meaningless promises to live on paper.

instead I paint Jupiter in brilliant watercolors and,

with clumsy inexperience with the medium,

can never stop it from dripping on Mars

where it sizzles and burns through the page

just like her memory,

ashes flaking away like the life

he stole from her.