VENUS

On lonely earth

you were the huge surface next to me

each morning I turned: mirror

reflecting me back to myself, close,

when there. When I lost you, I lost your voice.

Your face. I lost the way you saw me,

the glow you put me in.

Clouds pass, metastasizing across the sky,

but you shine through the wisps.

Dan Kraines has published poems in The Adroit Journal, The Carolina Quarterly, and Salmagundi, among many other places. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the University of Rochester, writing about the elegy in the work of four queer poets. He teaches at two public colleges in New York: City Tech and the Fashion Institute of Technology.