Violet Mitchell

Violet Mitchell is a poet and artist residing in Colorado. They earned an MFA in Poetry from the Mile-High MFA Program at Regis University. Violet teaches workshops with Alchemy Author Services and has had their paintings and poems featured in galleries and published with Heavy Feather Review, Word for Word, Inverted Syntax, South Broadway Ghost Society, along with several other journals. They received the Robert A. O'Sullivan, S.J. Memorial Award for Excellence in Writing in 2019.

Stars Do Not Love Other Stars

Where do we begin. Science says never. Science says always.

Hot galaxy hot stars bathing in blue milk—a spill makes a universe. A universe within a universe within a universe. Snow falls around me like stars. Cold white dust birthed from someone else’s death. We all circle around like this forever, converting from carbon to hydrogen to iron becoming a tree then a snowflake then bark on a log.

We all burn we all ash all sing all bury & be buried. The nature of the universe. How can we be certain about anything.

Could I pick out a blue stone if I saw one? Or would I never know it was there?

Windchimes

                                                We are
dizzy. We are
here to eat the orchids.
There are suns setting & they are on fire.

To be gentle in your new body,
to align your ashes
with lunar physics—
you were a wind leaving our air,
were one
with the moon.

We got the urn & scooped out a mason jar’s worth
of your new body. But we
never looked directly at you.

Only your son felt your grit under his nails.
Your new body is also metal in the wind,
                        the morning song.

We Are Amethyst Star Things

In a world that is burning

& there is a world where you are a small finch searching
moist soil for worms & there is a world made entirely

of sound. Some worlds begin with an aria & others
start with black holes ripping, like a sheet of cellophane. 

There is a world without the patters of winter rain
& there is dense blackness in the place of its star. 

A constellation is
a chain of goodbyes &
the stars wave

to small creatures
with bad eyes as
lights mulch & 

turn graves, gaseous clouds
sprinkling darkness
with their headstones.

There is a universe
where no star ever
collapses in on itself

& there is a universe
dark enough to be
inside your bone.

Gentle dawn false
red with hope crimson
like your blood like
your intestines

the cosmos created
& will soon eat again.

You point to a star
it picks a flame & creates
a new door

under a shooting star
the new sky swirls with
indifference & something
like the color green.