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"This is Not Another Poem About the Moon", "Winter Landscape No. 3" & "Fifth Season" by Sarah Mills



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.




Sarah Mills's poetry has been published or is forthcoming in HAD, Rust & Moth, The Shore, SoFloPoJo, Beaver Mag, MoonPark Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Ballast, Miniskirt Mag, Thimble, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. You can visit her at sarahmillswrites.com.

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