DominicanRepublic’s Counting Stars
My first time visiting my mother’s country
I’m eight and she finds me in the street
counting the stars because Moca has more
than Montauk and these stars are strung
to my anchor-heart. She says we all have a star
and if you count your star
you die.
I keep counting
and she stops
finding me.
* * *
There’s a man where we’re staying.
My mother says she knows him because
she used to love him.
She’s never met a man who couldn’t
love her back.
My mother starts leaving
her wedding ring all over Moca,
a truth harder to see at night.
* * *
My favorite drink: orange juice, Carnation milk, sugar, and vanilla. It’s called Morir Soñando
which means to die dreaming. I dream of dying.
* * *
My mother’s former love
takes a machete to his sister
and my mother says she needs
to protect him. She leaves
my sister and me
in a bed in this foreign
country to follow
him into the night.
My mother never thinks
to protect me.
Cradling my baby sister
in the bed we were left
in, I watch our mother
become the night sky.
I count my sister to sleep.
* * *
Some men don’t need machetes. Some men need
a body to be a body. Some men just need a mother
to leave the room.
It’s hard to hear a belt unbuckling
when you’re looking for a man
to help you hide your wedding ring.
* * *
I don’t count the notches
in a belt because I dream of dying
before it hits the ground
but if a belt is the night sky
and every notch is a star
does that make my molester another god?
All I know: it’s easier to stare at a discarded sky
than to be alive. How many lightyears
until I stop feeling this body? Until
it all stops?
* * *
In Montauk my mother asks me not to tell
my father about the men she leaves
me for. My mouth
is full of others’ secrets.
My father asks how my mother keeps losing
her wedding ring but I’m too busy
looking for Orion’s belt,
my own truth I won’t speak.
* * *
I can’t find constellations to save my life. No dippers or figures.
Only Orion’s belt. His body hides from me but those three little
dots are the only stars I ever see. I don’t recognize a hunter
until it’s too late,
but I recognize the way my anchorheart falls
with their guise. How I become a body gazing at all that’s
discarded, dreaming of my own death and the star to start it.
* * *
My mother confuses my silence
for steadiness. Sees a child sitting in stillness
and appreciates the paper weight
dependability. She sees what’s left of me. I’ll never
be a constellation. There’s no way to track
how I’m strung up to the stars by a desire to die and a heart
too heavy with loving who hurts me. Death
is a doorway. A place with no machetes or belts
or mothers who won’t help.
Dallas Atlas (they/he) is a poet named after a football team. He loves matcha & the moon. They can be found on Instagram @MadreMoca or on their website dallasatlas.com. His work appears in God’s Cruel Joke and Dragonfly.
