Jessica Bozek
Lost Constellation: Noctua
Without drugs I lack the imagination it takes to look up and see an animal in a scattering of stars. Rotate the shapes and a different bird emerges: solitaire, thrush, mockingbird, owl. Pictures overlapped as astronomers competed to colonize the southern sky. One autumn evening in 1822, Hydra’s tail became a perch and Noctua appeared. Words crowd the starlines as the child crowds the mother. I need a bowl / I need a sky. I can’t wash the cherries myself, she complains. Someone always gets the last word. The owl now a ghost space on a changed skymap.
Jessica Bozek is the author of The Tales (Les Figues/Punctum) and The Bodyfeel Lexicon (Switchback), as well as several chapbooks, including How to See the Wind (Dancing Girl). She teaches writing at Boston University and lives with her family in Cambridge, MA.