Brittany Lee Cheak recently won the Jim Wayne Miller Student Poetry Contest and has been awarded a scholarship for a writing workshop with Maurice Manning. She is a student at Western Kentucky University studying Creative Writing and Women’s Studies. She has been working on poetry for several years, and plans to pursue an MFA program. She works as a volunteer reader for Steel Toe Books and claims membership to the Future Procrastinators of Tomorrow.

 

This Is the Closest We Can Get To Heaven

 

The man who said we
journey to the stars
when we die
had it right.  

I fall out of myself—
reach upwards and outwards.
Keep reaching
until I’m floating.
I collide with the moon
and keep going.
Past Saturn,
past stars. With
opaque sails that
catch the wind— though
there is no wind in space.  

That’s why Li Po reached
into the river
to embrace the moon.
He didn’t know
he would sink
beneath the current and
bob up like a paper lantern,
hidden by the dirty
water of the Yangtze.

 

 

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