Sandra Yannone - The Star Show

Yannone LE P&W April 2025

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing April 2025

The Star Show, poems by Sandra Yannone.

The Star Show

In an earlier life I became an astronomer. I plucked

stars down from night’s giant sky

and placed them in my pocket, gently, like injured

birds, until their names arrived. Only then

did I release them back to their nutrient-rich night,

their gaseous soil-state to witness their casting

as they grew more into light. Sometimes

I’d release them to their pre-constellated

flights in pairs or flocks like puppies

or kittens who love to pile up in play

before they separate to find their loves,

their callings toward their lesson plans

with humans. Yes, you heard me correctly.

In an earlier life, we humans leaned in better

to the land, to the sea, to the stars, to the animals

outside ourselves and in for our wisdoms.

Universe, please, let me return for just one more

star show. My ill hands luminated

remain ready again, open.

Adagio for Solstice with Forget-Me-Nots

To never say always fills me with regrets.

I drown in whomever she was and was not.

I forget what it was I meant to forget

about her kiss, the one my mouth sublets

from every other longing, tongue-tied, knotted

always to never which fills me with regrets.

Every sideshow glance, an inlet

where I drown remembering my lot.

To forget what it was I meant to forget

requires the longest of days, tourniquets

around my heart cutting off the plot

to never say always. I’m filled with her regrets,

my unrequited embraces, my blood-let bets,

the longest day stretching longer, fraught

with remembrances I was meant to forget.

So I sleep alone with my ghost nets

buried at sea, pillows stuffed with forget-me-nots.

To never say always fills me with regrets.

I forget who it was I am meant to forget.

In the Time Before Niagara Falls

Today I love
her, fully
knowing

I will
lose her
then or now.

Or are
then and now
the same

sides of death?
Can love
bear these

slipstreams
of tongue
to create

the illusion
that a word
which

has covered
all time can hold
its definitions?

Love —
so unlike
water

always
refusing
its banks

whether
by flood
or drought.

Love —
so unlike
fire

which blazes
inside
and outside

of every fault
line. Love —
so unlike

anything we believe
we come to know
indelibly.

And now
that I choose
to embrace

that love’s
undefinable
territories reside

inside me,
love spills over
every cell

my body
predictably
replicates,

and I see
love
now

as more
akin to any
polarized

elements
seeking solace
in knowing

the other
exists.
And death

now seems certain
to ride along
inside love

like pallbearers
sit sanctimoniously
inside the hearse

with the body
inside
its bewildered

casket
or like the wooden
barrel tumbling

over Niagara Falls
holds the remnants
of liquor

inside
its oak walls
and the tongue

of its concealed
traveller
or like the hot globe

of glass
molting
into something

so new
we want
an undiscovered

name
to affix
love

on a map
for certain
eternity

until death
does perform
its final parting

which cannot
separate
any words

written down,
words now
and then

being
like lovers
forever holding

the stars
in their lined
hands, unable

to let go
of their time-
travelled

indivisible light.

I Don’t Want to Write Another Love Poem on the Ides of March

Because I see her now only

when I close my eyes,

where nothing familiar

and singular gets in my vision’s way,

I sometimes wish to remain

blind, my eyes seared shut

so she never leaves my inner sight.

I know she can’t apprehend why

my pupils prefer opening to her,

why my corneas crave her light,

why my optic nerves favor

sharing even her ghost

with my brain. They just do. And

any insight I have may be wasted

on one who has stopped

trying to see me, but that isn’t

the point here, is it? Or ever

was. To see her is to believe

that where once desire struck

like lightning, that lightning

can strike twice. To see her

is to cherish the door that opened

and praise the cut-glass knobs

turning. To see her is to know

what I knew as I stood in her

driveway that first morning

before I knew there

would be another and another and

marvel at the sun slanting through

the poplar trees to illuminate

her shine finding mine in that

particular way that only love

unclaimed can accomplish

when love needs at first sight

no explanation to persist. Something

so familiarly unfamiliar at first

that you think her smile can’t possibly be

true. And the leaves on the ground crunch

under your feet to remind you

that you are here and can tell her

how joyous it is to meet and that you

wish you didn’t have to drive away

today as she continues to stand before

your eyes, waiting for you, who does not

want to leave, to go, and so you tell her

your wish and watch her eyes

get bigger as if she can’t believe

what she is seeing take root

in her driveway. You live like this

for days, weeks, months, your eyes

beginning on that day to adjust

to her particular painstaking

way of being light that breaks

open toward you like no other

which is how you come to love again, a knowing

behind your eyes, a knowing that becomes

your second sight. And she doesn’t want

to be so special, but is in your eyes, and always

has been, just no one else sees her in this

incredulous way. She has so much

love to give she says, and you believe her

because seeing after all is believing

and what better thing to believe in

than love that doesn’t blind you

like the raw, pure sun except

when the thing you tell yourself

you see is mirage and you fling

your vintage eyeglasses to the ground

in dismay, for what good are they anyway

if they taught you to see

only that which wasn’t

going to remain all along?

You are now willing to blink

your eyes at least to recognize

that they exist to see others

trying to perform the same folly.

If you meet her again, who will she be?

Moon, sun, or stars, or none

of what’s above? Your eyes await

their test for eternity. Her touch,

her taste, her tease, her freeze,

her anything — all other stories to tell another time.

Crosscourt

A psychic pulls the card Justice from the deck
and hands it to me, astonished, weeping

inside. She does not know it is the hand I’ve felt
I’ve been dealt most recently, to hand over

my family’s brutal blindfolds, evidence of their hands
covering up the truth of my grandfather’s hands

swollen with drink around my grandmother’s neck
doing everything they could to shut her off

like a faucet, to bring a roaring
waterfall of a woman

to a mere trickle before
everyone’s bloodshot eyes.

In her refusal to drown, disappear, become
extinct, my grandmother hands him a daily defeat

he will not handle. When not occupied
with her demise, he keeps his hands free

to deliver drink after unfettered drink
to his parched lips. He has no words

he can hand over to a jury of his lineage
to justify his hands’ dirtiest work. He has no words

at all, just his hands working overtime, betting
hand after losing hand on the cards

he was too blind to read. Justice,
she reminds me, is a two-handed backhand

smashed crosscourt
down the line. A crushing blow

when the opponent has nothing left
but everything to lose.

Sandra Yannone (she, they), Poet Laureate of Old Saybrook, Connecticut, USA, is the author of The Glass Studio (2024) and Boats for Women (2019), by Salmon Poetry in Co. Clare, Ireland. She is co-editor of Unsinkable: Poems Inspired by the Titanic, forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in spring 2026. Nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net awards, her work has appeared in Live Encounters, Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland Review, Lavender Review, and Women’s Review of Books, among many other print and online journals. Since March, 2020, she has hosted Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry on Zoom via Facebook. Visit her at www.sandrayannone.com.

One Reply to “Sandra Yannone – The Star Show”

Cynthia R. Pratt says:

March 29, 2025 at 8:14 am

These poems are just breathtaking—airy in the way landscape should be, but evocative as a group.