Drawing Down the Moon (A Ritual)

by Ellora Sutton

Wash your hands in the blood of a million dandelion clocks,
coat yourself in onion skin, the paper, the pearly layers

make the congregation weep in longing. They don’t know why,
just out of reach. Scud a puck of soap under your nails

for protection. Line the windowsills with fertilised eggs and
rags gauzy with menstrual blood. She’s already there.

Offer her your eyelashes, your baby teeth, your ephemeral
self. She likes flute music but open mouths will do.

White your cheeks with the sloppy oil of fish eyes and paint,
all the colours, she can’t decide if she’s Tokyo red

or Delft blue, all the shades that make up her undulating wrists.
Hold up a mirror, round as a cheese, and let her bask

in herself. Let her bathe. Her shoulders are strong, marble
and tidepools for palms. She’s all craters and crescents.

Don’t forget to hang mothballs from every picture hook.
How easily she is gone, like a lover, the door left open

and tea, chamomile, undrunk and steaming. The unwhite
wet of golden-skinned pears. A chime of seashells.

A winner of the Members' Poems competition in the Summer 2019 issue of Poetry News. The competition theme was 'The Moon', to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the first lunar landing. The judge was Kit Fan.

Ellora Sutton

Ellora Sutton lives in Hampshire, where she is studying towards an MA in Creative Writing with the Open University. She has been published in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, The Cardiff Review, Mookychick, and The Female Spectator, amongst others. She was commended in the 2019 Winchester Poetry Prize; won the 2019 Pre-Raphaelite Society poetry competition; and has been a winner of several Young Poets Network challenges. Her debut chapbook is forthcoming from Nightingale & Sparrow. Ellora is the first-prize winner of the Carol Ann Duffy challenge on Young Poets Network, judged by Mari Hughes-Edwards, and celebrating Duffy's legacy as Poet Laureate. She is also the first-prize winner of Bailey Blackburn's 2018 August challenge #2 on found poems and the third Bloodaxe Archive challenge, The Re-Re-Re-Drafting Challenge. Ellora is also the second-prize winner in August challenge #4 on the poetics of interrogation, written and judged by Foyle Young Poet Kara Jackson in 2019. She is the third-prize winner of the Ode to (Small) Joy challenge and August Challenge #2: Fairy Tale Poetry. Ellora is commended in the first, second and fourth Bloodaxe Archive challenges, The Poetics of the Archive, White Space and Take Note; the 2019 and 2020 poetry translation challenges with Modern Poetry in Translation; the Mary Wollstonecraft challenge, written and judged by Bee Rowlatt of the Mary on the Green campaign; the moon poetry challenge, judged by Nii Parkes; the Golden Shovel challenge, judged by Peter Kahn; the Bletchley Park challenge, judged by So Mayer; the W. S. Graham challenge judged by Rachael Boast as part of Graham’s centenary celebrations; and Ankita Saxena’s protest poetry challenge, remembering 100 years of the women’s vote in the UK.