Sleepy Paralysis

          She’s a paradise-plucked god kept
                                    in a cryo-continuum.
                                                                       I’m a cosmonaut, orbiting a space
                                                                                 solstice, a thousand
                                                                                      reincarnations
                                                                                                     away.
          Her body suffocates a bouquet
          of realities.
                                  When the day ends,
                                                  her skin begins
                                                                            to wilt.
                                                                                   But I’m in space, singing
                                                                                           to sea stars
                                                                      and growing flowers on the sun,
                                                                                       a light-year moat
                                                                                                 between us.
By midnight, Fate snakes a vine through her lungs.
          Faith tosses it like a net
                                  out to sea, a vernal equinox,
                                                                      an anchor spackled with gravity.
                                                                 I can see it. It’s not far.
                                                            My asteroid-arm reaches out, but the breath from her
                                                              sobbing chest wrenches it away.
          She is
                                  waning.
          Her vine-tether sticks to the side of a passerby whale.

                                                                    I grasp at him, but come
                                                               away with just a fist of diamonds,
                                                                 and he speeds through space
                                                                                       without
                                                                                                 me.

                                                               He drags her cryo-coffin behind him,
                                                                                       smattered
                                                                                 with dark matter
                                                                            dirt,
                                                                     a chariot.

McKayla Anne Rockwell was born and raised in Youngstown, Ohio, where she developed a passion for community and writing. She is currently the Assistant Editor at Volney Road Review, and has been published in two anthologies by Eber & Wein, as well as a local magazine, Penguin Review. She hopes to one day write and edit for children’s and young adult literature, while giving back to the city she grew up in.
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