Some say it’s older
than the universe itself
but we could see it
through your binoculars,
the ones you carried to the opera
the time we split forever
over the third act of Lehar’s Stargazer.

We lie on the grass
beneath Methuselah
adjusting the lenses, Bausch & Lomb
your dad’s, their leather holster nearby
repaired a few times
by an Amish cobbler in Canton, Ohio.

Both men would disapprove of us
two women=sin, E=mc²
The energy I pour in you today
I will wrestle back tomorrow;
all the while, Methuselah floods
its light into the void
for fourteen billion years.

Tomorrow at the market
we will buy white Saturn peaches
and feed each other, laughing,
sweet sticky planets
only available
one week in August.

Olga Maslova is a Ukrainian-American writer and theater designer. Born and raised in Kharkiv, Ukraine, she holds an MFA in dramaturgy from SUNY at Stony Brook and an MFA in costume and set design from NYU, and she is a 2021/2022 Fulbright Fellow. Olga is the librettist of several large-scale vocal works: an opera, Black Square; an oratorio, The Last Day of the Eternal City; and an art song cycle, Venetian Cycle. Olga’s poetry has appeared and is forthcoming in New American Writing, Plume Poetry, Strange Horizons, ONE ART, Passengers, Milk and Cake Press, and others. She teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. You can learn more about her at olgamaslova.com.