Ode to the Guest Star | Kenton K. Yee
Browsing in my campus library I chance upon a colorful print
of what Chinese sky watchers dubbed (in ancient Chinese)
’The Guest Star’ because it burst into the blue in 1054 and
faded two years later as if it never existed. An 18th century
English astronomer, through a telescope, this time at night,
rediscovered it, a tangle of yellow-red and white legs around
a bluish face, and dubbed it ‘Crab Nebula.’ I love crab butter,
the yellow and lime-green gooeyness my mother let me eat
out of Dungeness crab carapaces bought in Chinatown and
steamed Fisherman’s Wharf style. Now halfway through grad
school, I haven’t sniffed crab steam in seven years. “We’re
meant to be,” I whisper. “Prepare to be cracked and sucked
out of your chitin.” The Crab and I blush. We’re in cahoots,
as only prey and carnivore can be, and we understand that I
will ravish him right here, in front of the library’s panoramic
windows for the universe to see. Beneath the main print are
ultraviolet and infrared images. In every image, the crab
looks battered and machete-hacked—like me. Below it all,
in black & white, ‘4500-6500 light years away’—its distance.
This is what art feels like, how truth and beauty, being un-
reachable, are likely millennia away from what’s rendered.
Bonus audio of Kenton reading his poem:
About the author:
Kenton K. Yee’s recent poems appear (or will soon) in Kenyon, Threepenny, Cincinnati, RHINO, Quarterly West, Poetry Northwest, Plume Poetry, Poetry Wales, Rattle, Best Microfiction 2026, and other venues. His debut poetry chapbook is due to drop from Bull City Press in 2027. He writes from Northern California.