Moon Bone

I want the moon the night we lay in the grass—moonlight spilling across your skin, the twilight of your body breaking. The stars were splitting—opening like petals in damp air. A sliver missing from the moon’s right edge, crumbling as your hand slipped from the crease of my back to the fold of my hip. I felt my spine shatter, as if stepping on a pile of crisp, fall leaves. Light muted, eyes opened, your lips grazed mine. It felt like dawn, but it was night. The dark grass felt wet. The light offered its mystery to us—one last apple stem in Eden. I could tear. I could dangle here. Angled in the sky’s folding canopy. I could break its black film, touch it, feel its weight in the palm of my hand, squeeze it softly, let you brush it, fingering its light in the space between my five knuckles, let it settle on the downward curve between my ribs and waist. Let’s lie here forever, your words trickling onto my soft ear lobe. I wish. You knew I broke wishes. Wish bones were bones for a reason. In these wishes, it’s always you—under the stars, tossing soft apples—half bitten, split by teeth, flushed red, caught. It’s so easy to wish flushed things. 

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Mooselook Moon

  In Maine, when the waves fell back, and the stars leaked from the dark sky like secrets from a tight mouth, we’d spill our cloths on the wet hill and run our bodies down its grass, to the lake below, a shadow as dark as the sky. Sometimes, I jumped quickly, the water crashing my feet, thighs, waist, shoulders, eyes. It felt like calm ice, and as my head unfolded into the air I screamed in enchantment, a sign to the others that I had resurfaced safely.

  One by one our bodies would collide with the water, scream after scream, water surrounding us like masks. It was only us in the night’s black dome—no boats’ lights shone, our parents’ voices muddled with the light of the stars, I felt as if we lived alone beside the moon.