orbital wings
over my shoulder i find a moth, flashing and fluttering for attention. she craves the moon, as we all do. the moon is in the mirror, silver bouncing like a mother’s tummy. the moth wishes to be a star, as we all do. to exist in the same darkness as everything else, to radiate outwards for absolutely no purpose. the darkness wants to hold us all. the moon wants to circle us all. sometimes i gravitate towards my own reflection. as a child i was reprimanded for staring into the dark window across the dinner table to examine my own face. my mother called it narcissistic, which is ironic. it would be cliche to write about narcissus in a piece about mirrors. but i will say, we are all in love with our own reflections. this is what love is. to find someone who shines back the best parts of you, provides the best silver glowing, as the moon. the best love is the mirror castles at the fair, or the way i would open my grandmother’s cabinets to create infinite, shrinking me, fading into a point of darkness, far away, where the moth wants to be. who we are as people develops by reflection. you do a thing, your parent reflects it back to you. perhaps they reflect it along with too much light, blinding you to your faults. or they absorb you into themselves and make you nothing, more like a window that a moth would bang into and die against. or sometimes they just say, hello, this is you, this is what you are doing, do you see? the moon says, do you see? do you see me, and you? together? in this little gravitational field we have going on? it is only happenstance that the moon orbits around us. if i were floating out in space trying to get to know the moon, i would orbit around her. we are all orbiting, and we are all the center of everything. i make my own gravity, as do you, as does the moth. tiny pulling, all over the whole world, and by that i mean everything. however, we must also consider wings. tiny pushing, all over the whole world. pushing up and away, but also towards. we are all flying, some of us into dark windows and some into mirrors, and some into darkness itself.
Sophia Cannizzaro is a perpetual student from Vermont, now living in New Orleans. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Wild Word, Isacoustic*, Monstering Magazine, Dialogist and Metatron Press. She is a full-time artist in that she fills as much of her time with art as she can, doesn’t really get paid for it, and therefore works several odd jobs to pay for things. Her favorite website is etymonline.com and she can be found at https://sophiacannizzaropoetry.wordpress.com/ or on Instagram @sophia.luci.cannizzaro.