This Is Not Another Poem About the Moon
The next blue supermoon won’t come until 2037, and by then, we may be gone. Have you thought about that? Once in a blue moon, I would love not to wake up at 3 a.m. worried about mass shootings and wildfires. Once in a blue moon, I would love for you to write me a love poem. It might go something like kiss me / with red lips / under the sunset maple / all aflame. Not that I’ve composed your love poem for me. Not that I thought about it while standing alone in a field, reciting a sonnet to the blue supermoon. Were you looking too? Maybe I wished it had swallowed me. Let me dissolve on its silver tongue. Maybe I’m digesting in the belly of the blue supermoon and these words are reaching you as moon dust. I read it was 17,000 miles closer than average, but looking at it, alone in a field, thinking of you—it felt so far away, you know? At 3 a.m., when everything hurts, I rub the moon’s mint salve all over my body, wondering what’s the point of anything? And then, once in a blue moon, it hits me. This.
Winter Landscape No. 3
Someone glued cotton balls to gray construction paper and tried to pass
it off as the sky. Some days, I think of you and smile, and that feels like enough. But then night brushes me with its long fingers and I long to taste the salt on your lips. I can tell you everything here and snow will absorb the sound. I’m sorry you’re the one I love. I’m sorry I’ve let you bleed through the center of every poem. There are a dozen words for snow, but no word for this heat on my neck when you speak. No word for how your breath fades with my name still in your throat. I want to be as numb as microplastics in clouds. To land softly at your feet and disappear.
Fifth Season
with thanks to Joe Barca
You poured my last good cup of coffee. So hot, and served in a disposable cup because back then you thought climate change could’ve been a hoax and that landfills were lonely. Now my coffee is cold, the earth is burning, and you’re gone. I remember that night in the season we invented to hold us between fall and winter—red in the trees, the two of us like wildflower seed balls rising from snow. We were looking out the window at the lake, out past the headless swan, still somehow singing. The stars were crying, or was that just us, because we were friends but wanted to kiss? What did we see out there, other than a park bench, pigeons, a newspaper floating by? What were we looking for? I want to go back to Venus with you, spin in the opposite direction, back to that chamber we built with desire. My house still smells like that night: light roast coffee, Styrofoam, sandalwood incense. When I look out the window and squint my eyes, it’s you I see on the lake. It’s you I am looking for, and always was.