Alex Pickens

Snorting stardust and cracking hyperspace
Tearing up time continuums with a drag race
Running rings around Saturn and blue Neptune
Speedsters shootings stars of hydrogen fusion boosters
Slingshotting out of groovitational fields until our smiles
Stretch tight across our skulls, and smoke leaks out
Of the amplifiers and nostrils with our doobies askew
Later we’ll get loose and hang from Orion’s belt
And make wishes and flick coins into black holes
Watch them stretch while we down another moonshine —
Wake up in Laughing Sam’s Astroid with some android
A few stars misplaced, nebulae-brained, with stretched face
Space is dark and empty, but we laugh when they tell us
Because where there are supernovas there is stardust.

ALEX PICKENS graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in English and a B.S. in economics from James Madison University. His poems have been published in Tuck Magazine and Gardy Loo and his screenplay Black Friday was an honorable mention at the national 2017 Screenplay Festival. He is currently working on a novel and another screenplay and writes poetry when he is mentally unstable.