Tallon Kennedy
Eclipse Hangover / A Month Later
Pittsburgh wasn’t in the path of totality.
The eclipse slipped by us— the sun
a crescent moon through blacked-out glasses,
and that was it. A disappointment,
the feeling of missing something truly remarkable.
That’s what loving him has been— partial.
His boyfriend in totality.
Is it something truly remarkable?
Breathtaking?
Have I slipped off the rooftop
where we felt the temperature drop
twenty degrees
only to be the same as before?
And yet, isn’t this really something?
To be alive and adjacent
to miracle.
All these people, all watching an alignment,
constrained by time and place, like everything else—
like everything else, I am hungover
from a love that hit too hard.
I suppose we’re all waiting for an alignment
that shatters the spirit-shattering
day to day.
For me, it is this: 2024— totality cuts
across our suburban Ohio hometown.
I imagine by then we’ll be states, if not countries,
apart. But, here I am, stuck in a present
that needs a future to build towards:
something so complete
you can’t help but live for it.
Tallon Kennedy is a poet from Columbus, Ohio. They are an undergraduate student of literature, writing, and gender studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Their previous works have been featured in Rust + Moth, Lit.cat, and The NewPeople Newspaper.
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