Self-Portrait as Star Burning Out | Hannah Cajandig

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1 min read

Endings always start the same way—stellar 
nurseries clouded with beginnings 

in the form of hydrogen, newborn specks 
of bright, birthed in the recesses of nowhere. 

They stumble and flash with laughter, and for a moment 
you almost feel like a part of something 

until suddenly, you are behind glass—you want to choose 
the color of your aura. You choose to be all of them  

because you are afraid of grey. You want to be colored 
with any color. You are bursting with instability, 

stroking your bangs, pulsing with questions 
while you are busy deconstructing 

drywall and whispering the night away 
beside someone in this carnival 

of catastrophes, of montaging through cycles 
of red giants dying into planetary nebulae 

down to the smallest prick of light 
until suddenly, darkness—explode and repeat.


Hannah Cajandig-Taylor resides in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where she is an MFA Candidate at Northern Michigan University and an Associate Editor for Passages North. Her prose and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Snapdragon, Tulane Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, Drunk Monkeys, Sidereal Magazine, and Rising Phoenix Press, among others.