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Under the Halo of the Sky
Andrea Blythe
May 14, 2021
The other night I saw UFOs. By which I mean that I saw objects in the sky that I could not identify at the time.
When I come home and the night is clear, I look up — searching for some sign of the constellation Orion, that glittering figure who provides me with a sense of comfort. However, when I tilted my head up the other night, the stars suddenly looked strange. Such a straight line of stars, I thought. What constellation is that?
Stopping mid-stride as I was about to cross the street, I continued to watch the sky and noticed that the stars were moving. My thoughts churned first to planes, then to satelites. But the string of lights numbered in the twenties, all moving in a straight, fairly evenly spaced line — and these lights did not align with the versions of such objects that I'd seen before.
Finding myself in the presence of a mystery, I was befuddled and slightly awed. I stood there in the street watching the lights make their slow journey across the sky. Finally, several minutes later, the train of lights ended and the last one disappeared behind the trees.
Although I joked later about the lights being associated with aliens, I knew they would have some earthly explanation. Nevertheless, seeing them felt strange and magical.
In a moment of wonder, those lights broke me out of the mundane routine of my day. The lights and their movement accentuated the curve of the sky, bringing to mind star adorned halos found on religious figures, marking them as holy.
It felt like I was being haloed — and if I extend the image outward to the world around me, we were all being haloed together. The stars are always present, even when hidden by the bright of day, and as beings in the universe witnessing them, we are adorned by starlight and blessed. Graced with life and breath, our existence matters. We matter.
Announcements
My deep dive into the intersections of the Unus Annus channel, cyberpunk, shitposting, and ephemeral art has been published by Interstellar Flight Magazine. I went down a number of rabbit holes to write this essay, so I hope you enjoy reading it.
On my blog, I gushed about the Writing Excuses podcast and their latest eight-episode master class on poetry, explaining why I loved it and why others should also tune in and listen to the episodes — whether they're a poet or not.
I've been invited to participate in the Shuffle Collective, a new social media platform designed around creative communities and projects. I'm having fun loosing myself in developing my profile. Because the platform is highly project based, the profile becomes almost like a portfolio of new and existing work, which I find rather fun and interesting.
Good Reads
Three Poems by Jari Bradley (The Adroit Journal) —
“In the dense forest of language
lay the parts of my selves
driven into the wilds by man—
my heavy hooves carrying my body
like a betrayal against the night’s
unsolicited touch, where I was a child
once, a daughter of the dust
then memory; its deep onset of indigo.”
Carmen Maria Machado discusses a recent instance of banning books in her essay, "Banning My Book Won't Protect Your Child." She writes,
"Those who seek to ban my book and others like it are trying to exploit fear — fear about the realities that books like mine expose, fear about desire and sex and love — and distort it into something ugly, in an attempt to wish away queer experiences."
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