Halfway through the night I still cannot explain, we saw it all— 
the fractal glint of something hanging above the birches. Orange
& white & drumming. On wet knees in the open field, clustered
at the edges of the star-map, we spoke as if tenured. It was not
planetshine, not a satellite, not the glow of street-lights echoing
off cloud. It held. Hung. Waited there like a clot of uncooled
shrapnel welded into space. So when, at last, it rifled across the sky
faster than our excuses, clipping behind the horizon & the dark
stilts of a cell tower, what could we do but leave that field, hike
voicelessly home along a deer-trail through the appalling
room of a night no longer ours? I did not want to be at the back
of the column lugging the telescope like a bazooka. But doing so, 
I knew something. There are only so many ways to describe
cigarettes crossing a darkened field. Space junk, fireflies, 
sometimes dancers. All of these are true.

CONNOR YECK's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, Crab Orchard Review, Southern Poetry Review, Columbia Journal, and JuxtaProse, and was recently long-listed for the Vice-Chancellor's International Poetry Prize. An MFA candidate at Western Michigan University, he works for New Issues Press, and is upcoming Poetry Editor at Third Coast.