How to Make Shooting Stars

I.
Must burn them out through the atmosphere
but must have a luminous stroke
like a branch growing out straight
from Chinese paper
on the edge, a bird and dots of apricot.

On the tip of a chopstick
I pasted my ear wax and burnt it when I was nine
to see yellow sparks—
how about my eye mucus and snot—
to search for a bit of salt from my body,

in the dark kitchen,
Sister wanted to burn hers too,
and later we climbed the fence
above the roof of the elevator operation room
where we sat at 3am in 1999.

We saw shooting stars—
most of them had blue tails—
they contain copper, I told her
and we laughed imagining a piggy bank
full of ten-yen coins; the glow stained the eastern rim.

II.
From up here, a long line
between Lake Michigan and the sky
slightly curves.             I open my arms to balance
as if my body is rolling on a large ball
but—falling faster
accelerating—I am in the gravitational well
which captures everything                    equally
as the fake shooting star bears here;
without digging up random soil. After birds fly away,
after nobody hurts,
my parachute opens. The belts tighten around my stomach,
I taste breakfast pancakes,
floating with my tongue for the next twenty minutes.

III.
It is kind of silly to launch shooting stars,
especially since there are 599,872 space debris spinning;
twisting around the earth, waiting to be burnt
like a sesame seed covered red-azuki paste
in the deep core (mochi that only I want to eat).

But these—
these fried seeds scald my fingers.
When they cool down, the mochi hardens, so
I can just strip the thin layers—

like Grandmother uses a bamboo strainer to select
the shiny, plump beans,
and scatter the bad ones to chickens
that peck in the frost.

IV.
Once I saw a meteorite in an oversized glass cage,
the crag contained unknown metals
that was why it sliced fireworks above the Sumida River;
rippled through the night smoke;
dripped on sizzling pans.         Do I fear this—
it isn’t human made, no gunpowder inside its hard case
after carefully placing aluminum spikes;
strontium carbonate for red glimmers.

Don’t we know—
the artificial ones ignite when they fall,
then ignorantly we pray to them—
as bright as shooting starts.

_________

Naoko Fujimoto’s publications are forthcoming in POETRY, Kenyon Review, the Seattle Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Cream City Review, Prairie Schooner, and many others. She has been working on her new online Graphic Poetry Project. She is so thrilled to have the established poets and writers record her original poems. More details, please visit https://www.naokofujimoto.com/