The Janitor Says
By Olivia Ferrari

 

The spaceman said the universe was filled with stardust
that it was made of everything and coated everything

 

That there was a piece of me in the heavens, and
a piece of the heavens in me. His words were written in

 

my yellowed and sour smelling textbook and I thought
I saw stardust in the ink. So what are we to make of

 

its gentle dusting on desktops, or its suspension in
sunlight? Or the drops of smoke from a cigarette

 

between red-black fingernails, detaining a flame
desperately spawning threads of spiders-silk white?

 

It breeds ashes. Is there not also divinity in that dust?
Cigarette ashes fly to Mars, and rest, stalled in languid time

 

as the north wind sleeps, leaving particles stagnant
and forgotten by Opportunity.

 

The cosmos are but ashes, after all. A thousand suns
have shattered to particles and bird bones, reduced.

 

They are all stardust, and they coat empty parking lots
like spring pollen on pink petals. Time has shamed

 

galaxies into communion with memories of skin cells
and kingdoms and crumbs on countertops.

 

They say Rome’s rubble paints your forgotten china,
and lunar regolith the dust on my velvet shoes.

 

Stardust sits in my stomach next to carrots, and sleeps
in the aging pages of my physics homework.

 

 

Olivia Ferrari from US is an undergraduate at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. While raised in the California Bay Area, she has spent time living in North Carolina, Southern France, and Switzerland. Through her travels, she has developed a love of life and creation, and captures this passion through her writing. Olivia explores writing as she teaches English to young adults and works as the Poetry Editor for Inscape Journal. She spends her time studying English, Botany, and French, and can often be found painting, writing, drawing, designing clothes, and singing in her punk band.