Jonathan Greenhause

Cassiopeia

The moon is a luminescent peach. Jo drills the walls
as if charting constellations, seeds

a flawless Cassiopeia; while her daughter, Andi,
hugs a bucket of screws, offers them

like fistfuls of stars. Jo heaves a colossal bureau
through a window jammed with sky,

ignores her neighbour Steff, a grumbling homemaker,
whose yapping Yorkie narrowly avoids

the mahogany crush. Andi and her brother, Ro,
wonder if their simple question

caused this mess of motion, Jo’s unravelling threads
yanked from mothballed sweaters,

while they’re a pair of needles lacking steady hands
to knit their mum back together.

Jo flips between stillness & acceleration, a rocket
before its blastoff converts her

into a crazed collector of kilometres, her childhood
a parade of beauty pageants,

her parents’ wishes a claustrophobic kiss. Her kids,
obedient satellites, approach her,

their breaths astronauts gasping for air, their query
simply expressing their innocence

as they thought aloud if they could live somewhere
starlit, with a bit more space.

Jonathan Greenhause’s poetry collection, Cupping Our Palms (Meadowlark Press, 2022), won the 2022 Birdy Poetry Prize. He has won the Teignmouth Poetry Festival Open Competition, the Ledbury Poetry Competition, Aesthetica Magazine’s Creative Writing Award in Poetry, and the Telluride Institute’s Fischer Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Fish Anthology, The Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales, The Rialto and The Poetry Society website.

Jonathan said the following about his poem:

I fused the terrifying moment I almost dropped a mattress through a 3rd-story window onto a passerby below, the ever-present anxiety and wonder of being a son and a parent, plus a bit of informal Greek mythology, and – voilà! – they aligned into this constellation of domestic oddities. Initially written with a younger audience in mind, “Cassiopeia” was later workshopped in The Poetry School’s phenomenal Fortnightly Feedback with Kandace Siobhan Walker, gradually shifting into couplets before finding its perfect space thanks to The Interpreter’s House.