Katy E. Ellis is a freelance writer who lives in Seattle, Washington. Her poetry is forthcoming in Soundings Review, and has recently appeared in Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, as well as in Sycamore Review, Rinse & Repeat, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Faultline, and in the Canadian journals Grain and Fiddlehead. She has traveled through a handful of countries in Central America, throughout Europe, and has lived and taught English in Istanbul, Turkey.
I Don’t Want To Know the Moon
From the Space Needle ten-cents-a-minute viewers I don’t see a face or a rabbit in the moon’s sea. No moon man or woman covered in moonbits and star nits. There’s a belly button maybe stretch— birth— or beauty marks. Nothing spelled out except C is a Cup. But is it pouring out the moon or filling up?
I don’t see golden anything but plums the first time I wrap my naked self in sheets, barefoot through a plum orchard to cull shaggy branches for moonlight-sweetened full fruit. Blue wine beneath moths in compulsive love with landing and dying on light bulbs.
What is all this about tektites and hard candies pelted from orbital distances? Or grazing occultation, a body’s edge touched and untouched? Don’t tell me about earthshine— “old moon in the new moon’s arms”— cradles illuminated.
The last thing I need to know is the dark side exists, every crater a named mouth: Apollo, Tsander, Korolev, Mendeleev. Let’s keep the moon a coin, or a peephole to another universe. The moon does not bear children, or secretly howl behind itself.
It’s enough for me to know mine is the moon named Young Birds Are Full-Fledged, Sturgeon, Green Corn and Berries Ripen Even in the Night Moon.
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