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Moon Goddess on Missing Gravity by Debora Kuan

March 8, 2022
Reading Time: 1 Minutes

Tonight the moon rings against my teeth

like cast-iron played with a mallet.
                    I hold my imaginary life out

                    over a hard clay roof

and shake its excesses over the world,

the scent of phosphates saturating the atmosphere.

                   Whatever you want from

                   family you should say

before it is too late. I should know

because love slipped beneath my straw

                    slippers and dashed away
                    before I could ascertain

if it was a furred creature or a reflection

of a traveling light. My stomach aches now

                   in the room without a door,

                   in the republic with no bright flag.

It wakes me in the small hours

and reminds me of a little-known

                 life past, in which I could stand

                 rooted in my own feet

and lift my chin up to greet

the imaginary firmament.


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Poetry  / The Weekly

Kuan, Debora
Debora Kuan is the author of XING and Lunch Portraits. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, The Iowa Review, ZYZZYVA, Boston Review, New American Writing, and elsewhere. She has received a US Fulbright creative writing fellowship, as well as residencies at Yaddo, Macdowell, and Santa Fe Art Institute. She is currently poet laureate of Wallingford, CT, where she lives with her husband and two children.

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