We stalk the moon all month round, lick  our lips, till the Adhan goes off on our phones, dig our teeth into the soft flesh of dates, wash it down with Roohafza, rinse and repeat. The  scholars paste their eyes to the sky, the crowds  trade their eyeballs for telescopes, watch the  moon turn bashful, […]

Here, I am closer to the gaps in the sky where nine suns fell. I can touch the trails left by my husband’s arrows, where the night was almost unseamed. And Mother, I can look down at the clouds that drag like the hem of your dress. I can see the valley where you taught […]

The moon looking down at the carol singers. The moon looking down at carrots for the reindeer, wishing he could eat them.

I’m in my bedroom staring at the moon, wondering if I could ever visit him. From here, it looks like the moon is      dancing in the light, as my shadow creeps across it.

laying in a bed of forget-me-nots and wild garlic all Ophelia       all bone and froth, you know, the way they paint girls             I saw a dolphin arc over the moon, that great voluptuous croak                         (I kid you not) and then I looked around and                         I was laying on the moon, and it […]

The Earth held tight to what it had been given; those clear skies, that startling life. It held me to be a woman, gravity-bound. Wife with no husband, mother to the stars. A goring crescent. Sharp slice of lithium consuming itself. I was Selene and Sina, stray Chang’e, a goddess dissolving on the night’s tongue […]

old Mount Mikasa under the unchanging glow waited, too – in vain nightly rose the cry: two shipwrecks and a war away lies my native land but the rabbit, hunched, pounding eternal rice cakes lends no ears to sorrow and so the poet immortalised by his longing lays his brush to rest.

Still they say I am moon full, swollen with light and spilling over floorboards. Rippling with tides, roaring with dreams, ready to consume and ready to release,           bleached          white bones                          flung           to a bleached  white beach. Still they say I am moon stung, hymning […]

What about Cheerios, awash  in the milk of the night or the chalk dust of toast – imagine the stars swiped from the sky by a napkin.  A cereal bar, with rivers  of yogurt and chocolate  aliens of dried apple – I am decorated with wrappers like aeronautical debris.   My granddad told me the moon […]