Hanyi Zhou

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Astronomy Lesson

By then, the stars will have turned back
into salt—dissolving, grain by grain.

Mama rinses the red from my heel,
the sink clouding, then clearing.

I look up at the stars. No one I once
grew up with remembers tasting them.

The moon will go on rehearsing
its one soft trick—slipping in, slipping out.

In the margins of physics books, the world was
pulled on a string, straight from a workshop

where everything moved by hand, the way my father
tinkered with his buckets of sand until the sun yolked

back into the sky for another day. The planets, too,
practice their slow rotations, the way my steps held

as the teacher watched from the end of the bar,
my reflection flickering in the mirror until it was right.

That is how the universe shifts the rivers—
returning our blood back into water. Now, as afternoon turns

to evening and the stars click back on,
Mama sets down the lanterns.

There is no other way: the water will take our bones.
Mama says, enough—let the dark in.

And I will—how we blink and
turn sadness back into salt.

Still, some remnant of us lingers—a handprint,
fossilized in the dust between tufts of moss.

Blood thinning back into water, beneath
the static astronomers mistake for noise.

Hanyi Zhou is a poet from Hong Kong. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Minnesota Review, Zone 3, and Sonora Review. Her poems have been recognized by Bennington Young Writers, the Nancy Thorp Poetry Contest, among others. She finds joy in all forms of literature and writes poetry about memory, cultural inheritance, and the quiet textures of everyday life and care