When I Grow up, I Want to be

a constellation.

Something people pore over
for millenniums
to try to get a handle
on their lives.

A bit of star matter
folks scan to glimpse 
the brightly familiar—call it bear,
goat or dog—and make it 
more than itself.

A stretch of light
they invest with meaning,
luminous omen.

A magnet tugging
at tides and women’s cycles,
mesmerizing welcoming wombs.

The baseline by which surveyors
measure changing shorelines
and mountain ranges.

I want to be traced into,
and to track,
countless catechisms of history—
want to be cursed and credited
with a billion rises and falls.

Hell yes! I want to be
worth looking at and pondering,
gloriously ancient and grandiose, 
and yet

I think I’d be content to know
that once a sailor in troubled seas
found in me a point of reference

and made it home.

Terri Niccum’s most recent chapbook is Sky Leaning Toward Winter, released in 2024 from Moon Tide Press. She is the author of a full-length collection, The Knife Thrower’s Daughter, also from Moon Tide Press. Niccum was runner up for the Steve Kowit Poetry Prize (2020-2021) and a finalist for the Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest in 2024, as well as for the Slippery Elm Poetry Prize in 2026.