A Farewell Letter to Cupid and Belinda
by Jenny St. Angelo

You have been dubbed
“The Doomed Moons of Uranus”
Which seems unfair;
The rest of your orbital life
Defined by an event
One Thousand to Ten Million Years Away.

If your names came from
A different folio of the Bard’s, say,
Romeo and Juliet
We would speak of
Your inevitable demise
With awe and respect,
Art imitating life imitating art,
And with less tittering over your host’s
Unfortunate name.

But you are Cupid
And you are Belinda
Orbiting Uranus.
A cosmic footnote
Doomed to die
In a year we will never see.  

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Untitled
by Jenny St. Angelo

You know when you fall in love
-well, not actual love
But a close approximation
Of what you think
Love could really be?
I did that.
Which, okay, ouch.
Because proximity is not the same as intimacy
And sex is not always a physical
Expression of deeper affection.
But my chest filled with
Something like pride
With something like comfort
And with a little too much trust.
So when the inevitable end came
It felt less like the "pop!" of
Actual, surprising, painful grief
And more like the slow deflation
Of a balloon I blew up myself.