they were alley cats—
tin-roof prophets,
their ribs a xylophone for rain.
each had taken a planet
into the tender dark
behind the diaphragm:
one rat-scarred tom carried Mars,
iron dust ticking in his marrow,
a rust the size of childhood wars.
a lean gray queen held Pluto,
sub-zero silence clinging to her spine,
nitrogen frost dreaming of thin sunlight.
the black-and-ginger stray nursed Edasich,
an orange giant only 100 light-years distant;
her belly pulsed 4 500 K,
warm as dragons in forgotten tapestries.
and the white porch-ghost, half-feral,
rocked Deneb in her organs—
blue-white prodigy,
fifty thousand suns erupting in a hush.
night after night
they circled the knocked-over milk bowl,
gravity arguing in low throats,
tails penduluming epochs.
no claws, no hiss—
only the pressure of inner skies,
world-mass against world-mass,
until a bead of spilled oil
caught starlight and revealed a spiral arm:
evidence that every gutter,
every bruise-colored trash can,
is a nebula rehearsing birth.
remember this:
we are born of fire-laced dust,
we carry suns in our cartilage,
and nothing that learns the weight of light
fails to become light in the end.