I watch you follow a friend’s daughter,
her ride home after a shift at the restaurant.
It’s a school night, snowing. Mom is
working the graveyard so I watch you watch
their pale blue dot on your phone wheel
through the astrometry of youth: empty lot,
donuts, eight of anything such an inconceivable
number they topple it sideways, carve infinity
symbols in front of a bookstore. When you call,
she’ll say it was the friend’s idea, tell you it
is so terrifying, the looping out and back like
a comet, insides shaken, the maraca of forces.
How like us they almost managed to let go,
almost slid out into spaces between light.
Always just enough grip, enough to
lose control again.

Gus Peterson lives and writes in Maine. Recent work has appeared online with Panoply, Thimble, Bracken, Rust+Moth, and is forthcoming in print with Pirene’s Fountain this summer.