Two elementary school boys passed me.
I’m sure that I heard the younger one say
that the moon has no access to an axis,
so the dark side is the face you never know.
I’m sure that I heard the other one say,
the shape is a rabbit forming rice balls.
The dark side is the face you never show.
Mother touched Moon Daughter’s cheek.
The shape is shadow, is rabbit, is rice ball.
When Moon rose out of Ocean, star-lifted,
Mother touched shadow daughter’s cheek.
The abyss of loss wears unknown faces.
When moon rose out of ocean, star-lifted,
Rabbit was Shadow. A thief over his bag
of filched orbits and axes fixed Daughter
with her dark side forever fused to the sky.
Rabbit was Shadow. A thief in his bag he
marooned the moon. No access to an axis,
her dark side forever fused to soot black sky.
Two school boys passed me, inventing why.
Gerald Wagoner, author of When Nothing Wild Remains (Broadstone Books 2023) and A Month of Someday (Indolent Books 2023), says his childhood was divided between Eastern Oregon and Cut Bank, Montana, where he was raised under the doctrine of benign neglect. He has lived in Brooklyn, NY since 1982, where he exhibited widely and taught art & English for the NYC Department of Education. In 2018, Wagoner held a visiting poetry residency at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He is the curator/host of A Persistence of Cormorants, an outdoors reading series by the Gowanus Canal. In 2023, Wagoner received a Poets Afloat Mini-Residency at the Waterfront Barge Museum. Wagoner’s work has appeared in such places as Beltway Poetry Quarterly, BigCityLit, The Blue Mountain Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, The Night Heron Barks, The Ocotillo Review, Right Hand Pointing, Maryland Literary Review, and others.
Image: “Red-Faced Moon” by Kale
Pine Hills Review 