Based on the legend of Chang’e
Winter: the living room gleaned of moonlight.
A city slumped anemic over its knees, milky
and putrid like a wound unsutured. I used
to scrape rust from kitchen counters and drink fat
until my tongue swelled gibbous, large enough
to swallow the November sky and your rice fields
gone sour. Those nights I watched the skeleton
of a rabbit materialize in the television set, whetting
its teeth against the flotsam of your slumber:
your ribcage dipping into shadow, every joint slanted
like a knife. Today I am crimson-slick and excavated
sockets, colored soft white at the mouth like a pear
beneath sawtoothed iron. Today I am treachery’s
lovelier sister, unseaming silicon from terracotta
and looking pretty with metal pressed down
my tongue. I was hatched wide-awake from meteorite
and crescent powder with the ground halfway lunar
beneath my feet. I slip supernovas and crystallized salt
between teeth and set myself floating off-kilter,
drifting untethered from a world where men shed
their skins in and out of holiness and the earth
won’t rise without its mantle of bones.
Touch me and glisten for days on end. Watch me
spin garlands from gravity and silver-toned orbits,
fluctuating between every phase: the body
of a snow-laden goose, a tongue of light
during the eclipse. Let me
become moon-skinned, celestial—
nothing will ever hold me still.