Icarus

Icarus is a blue supergiant that was discovered in 2018 and is the most distant individual star ever detected.

I wake my husband, my cats, shrieking because
in the faint light that falls from the hallway, moon
leaking through the cracked blinds, I see human-sized
shadows cast in our room. I see the ceiling coming down
to crush us. I cry out what is it what is it at the faceless
thing that too often visits my bedside.
These night terrors come as star-deaths.
When the light from Icarus appears to suddenly go out,

astronomers will mourn for light that was lost
nine billion years ago. It’s the delayed death that comes
in flinches at my lover’s touch, decades after a babysitter,
a brother, shoved his fingers between my girlish thighs.
It’s the immediate instinct to duck after a glass slips
from my own hand and smashes on the ground.
Every time, my husband wraps me tightly while I tell him
my heart’s stopping, to take me somewhere or else
soon I’ll be gone. And each time, he reminds me
we must shut all the doors, close all the blinds.