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Moon challenge

Ramadan, 2019

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, […]

For Exile, or Chang’e Speaks from the Moon

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 […]

Christmas Moon

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

Moon Watching

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.

lunacy

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 […]

Wane

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 […]

Abe no Nakamaro’s moon

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.

“Oh you know how it is, women and their little phases…”

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 […]

The Moon as Different Types of Food

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 […]

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