WEDNESDAY: milky way

Poetry Week 2023 Runner-up!

BY ANDREA FERRARI KRISTELLER

Copyright is held by the author.

if every letter in this poem is a star
you will constellate them into figures of myth
or guidance or signs to seed

meaning

s c a t t e r e d

each sound starts
to shine like a small fire in this sky of paper
huddling together around a heat of gravity
this poem becomes a milky way
on the page of night
we shift along like planets
and words become other or you grow
into other in the gentle pace of gyring

each time this poem is read then is a new
night full of stars that you group together
as we slide along ages
so these stars may gather and say
there is constant beauty
sparks we witness in the dark

***

Image of Andrea Ferrari-Kristeller, smiling, wearing glasses.

Andrea Ferrari Kristeller is an Argentinean teacher, writer and naturalist. She travels to the Atlantic rainforest every year in the north of her country, near Iguazu Falls. She intermingles her teaching practice with volunteer work translation for conservation programs, and has participated in the building of the First Mbyá-Guaraní/Spanish- Spanish Mbyá Guaraní Dictionary (Rodas/Benitez, 2018) in its Penta translator section, for the English language. She is learning Mbyá Guaraní and translating their sacred text, the Ayvu Rapyta, into English. Her poems have been published by The Weekly Avocet, The Avocet, The Dawntreader, Erbacce, an ASEI Arts anthology, Poetry Undressed, Braided Way, The Poppy Road Review. Her novella “The Land without You” was given an Honourable mention at Writers of the Future contest, 2018. Her short story “The Ghost at the Whites’ Hoté” has recently been published in the anthology Haus, by Culture Cult magazine. “Her turning into a forest” has been accepted for publication by Globally Rooted.