The New Youth

by Michelle Askin

NASA Hubble Space Telescope

The new youth is like heaven or what they discovered passes for ethereal blue in the night sky a million galaxies away. The new youth is like 1987 or what I dreamt 1987 to be in that same year, as a small child peering through the high-rise glass to the view of a blue tennis court, the tight pink polo-shirt wearing and glamourous frosted hair university co-eds lobbying back and forth against a backdrop of cherry blossom trees and Chinatown-style dragon décor tea-houses, which means there is a tint of sadness and hope to all memory, to all longing. And today I go down the same street, and it still bustles with blue denim, the shade of sky, and nostalgic convertibles, while the radio music is pure free style dance since it’s the year of back to the synth and give me a rocksteady beat outside graffitied brown garages. Only now, I am past the excitement of longing, the sadness of hoping. I just ride the urban transit as a ghost in the new beauty that was not born when I was ready to feel the full bloom of my youth. And the new youth is like kissing the beautiful scars of my brother, who has moved so far beyond my living, holding him would be the sorrowful blur of dreaming. The new youth is every Sunday is Easter. And tonight, for a brief while, I am so alive with memory and the visions of prophetic saints, but heaven is too late for me or I am too late for it. Everyone I ever loved came of age in 1987. I loved the retro orange logos of their neon jerseys and the patched-on sail anchors of windbreakers like an early star in the fade to night. And I swam in the city pools of their youth, which is like loving someone younger—  always trying to imagine who they could be by who they were and how they made plans for their leaving. Everyone my age wants to bring back the grungy rock n roll, and the other things about the work for shit hard way, but I like the trance playing in fluorescent halls when the rain beats against the Persian rug walls. I don’t think this makes me elitist, but maybe just lonely and desiring escapism. Then there is the want to be holy, to be washed clean, knowing one day the world will end and we must prepare for eternity, which could be in the nebula cloud, where the new youth has already gone away to—waiting for the night to become the teal, gold remnants  of a supernova explosion that radio emissions through  what is left of my heart and the pulsed frequency  of such severe and radiant-red dreaming.

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Michelle Askin’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Broad River View, PANK, Oranges & Sardines, Pleiades, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and elsewhere.