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by Charles Rafferty
©2020 Oleksandr Rupeta **image from Someone in Your Corner series
Charles Rafferty’s most recent collections of poems are The Smoke of Horses (BOA Editions, 2017), Something an Atheist Might Bring Up at a Cocktail Party (Mayapple Press, 2018), and The Problem With Abundance (Grayson Books, 2019). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, O, Oprah Magazine, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares. New prose poems are forthcoming in Plume, Gargoyle, Rhino, and The Southern Review. He has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism. Currently, he directs the MFA program at Albertus Magnus College and teaches at the Westport Writers’ Workshop
Constellations
The stars of the flag are not the stars that matter. They have become a constellation that the wealthy
use to navigate their yachts. When I step outside to show my daughters Sagittarius, the very center
of our galaxy, they point only at the twinkling of passing jets. I need my neighbor to turn his
floodlights off. I need the population to be less dense.
© 2020 West Trade Review
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