Over the moon

My poem about expiring, “LA Confidences,” is a semi-finalist for Flatmancrooked’s Poetry Prize, and will be published in the Flatmancrooked Volume of Contemporary Poetics along with the 44 other semi-finalists plus a few well-known poets like Li-Young Lee, Eleni Sikelianos, and Forrest Gander. I am beside myself, and so happy for ana c.‘s original inspiration.

Redheaded wife

Out of nowhere, the beautiful Chinese girl walked into his life  . . . just as the redheaded wife walked out

Remember when almost every print magazine contained good literature? Me neither, but here is Moon Over Manhattan, by Pearl S. Buck, in McCall’s in 1953. The superb illustration reminds me of what Marty D. Ison does for Smokelong Quarterly today.

In spite of man, he crumbles

Song of Solomon 6:10 Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?

So

Why Are Your Poems So Dark?
Linda Pastan

Isn’t the moon dark too,
most of the time?

And doesn’t the white page
seem unfinished

without the dark stain
of alphabets?

When God demanded light,
he didn’t banish darkness.

Instead he invented
ebony and crows

and that small mole
on your left cheekbone.

Or did you mean to ask
“Why are you sad so often?”

Soft white

Am I an animal
          able to distinquish
                    beams of light
                             like music this moonlit night
                                      eyes closed

–Mizuhara Shion (trans. Hiroaki Sato)

Breaking my heart, shrinking my head

Listening to Miniature Tigers today:

Awake as the moon

Christine Lim Simpson

The sprinkler outside my window sounds like a spitting cat.

Heavy is the crown

A woman’s hair is her crowning glory, my grandmother always said.

Chema Madoz

She also once told me she felt like she was drowning. We had been washing dishes together in silence, her hands wrist-deep in suds.  I placed the plate I’d been drying in the rack and leaned over the sink on tiptoe to look out the window at the star-speckled sky. Searched for the Milky Way, scanned for the moon.

Crescent Earth

this post dedicated to Crispin Best, who is interested in and sad about the moon.