Nalyne Lunati © 2004 All Rights Reserved
Nalyne Lunati © 2004 All Rights Reserved
Adolescent Moon
I can’t remember a desire like that
except with words—
the fat sickly-yellow moon lighting up
the smog of the city,
orange and misty as the dry ice
in the zombies we drank,
and how that August
his upper lip was beaded with sweat
when he leaned across the table,
tracked my pulse between his two fingers
as if it were a blue snake
cracking open the sky.
I can speak the words but
deeper in the dark spaces of my body
I can no longer feel how it was,
the clicking of flames
across my skin, the way I caught
and flared like teeth in the night.
Not that what I feel now is less exactly,
more that it is different,
what is left when the pulse has
burned through the body,
the charred rib of a boat tossed
in the waves, the bones
that hold together the earth.
Sheila Black received her MFA from the University of Montana in 1998. She has had poems published in Blackbird, Pedestal Magazine, Willow Springs, Poet Lore, Ellipsis, and other journals. She lives in Las Cruces, NM.