Urban Animal Expeditions / Katy E. Ellis

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dancing girl press, 2012
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 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.