Luna

Moon-maker, moon-lover, I am the ocean, salty, what licks. I am cave, I am what vacillates. Mother sounds like mud. I stockpile the space between the water and the sky. He knows nothing. I am so dangerous.

Hear this: all the women are awake. My body cradled in my hands. The blood on my fingers, the printing between my thighs, we scaffold the future, the trail of blood between the bed and the bathroom, the moon that illuminates. All the water in my hands. There isn’t a dam you can build that I can’t break. Charisma, charisma. See what I can do.
 
 
 
 

Callista Buchen is the author of the chapbooks The Bloody Planet (Black Lawrence Press, October 2015) and Double-Mouthed (winter 2016, dancing girl press). Her work appears in Harpur Palate, Puerto del Sol, Fourteen Hills, and many other journals, and she is the winner of the Langston Hughes Award and DIAGRAM's essay contest.