How Strange it Is that the Moon Caught Fire

    LILY GODERSTAD

 

 

I wade through your shower spill, soaked

in I love you. A song you hum always

to the tune of sorry. I tell you

 

I’m drowning. You think it would

be romantic, so I remind you what

drowning means.

 

I’ve slept next to hundreds of nights

that were shaped like you, but could

not decide what voice to breathe

through. I will wait here

 

where cranes fall from our skies

like tired steel arms that realize

no one has an answer to their question.

 

 

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Ugly Girl Game

 

 

A majority of the second grade class was home with a virus, and the most popular girl in school asked me to play at recess. I ignored her reasoning. I didn’t know how to play with pretty girls, waddled beside her as she fluttered about the playground, barely disturbing the gravel beneath her steps. I listened to her tranquil narration, squinting to see how her tongue managed to spoil each word so evenly.

 

She anchored herself to a wooden bridge, and proclaimed she should be sick as well, and taken home at once. I didn’t want her to leave me. I didn’t want her to prefer illness to me. I told her the nurse would know she was a liar. Her perfect nose twisted upward. “A real reason, then,” she said. “I’ll make myself bleed.” She picked a smooth rock from off the ground, and rubbed at the top of her hand. She started singing to herself: “Tougher, tougher, tougher, every day, every day!” This was not a pretty girl game, I thought, or maybe they play it alone. Maybe that was why she had asked me to play, so she could do something ugly with someone who wouldn’t stop her.

 

I found a pointed stone to show her the difference between us, began tearing at my hand. She slowed once she saw me, told me I could stop, but I wouldn’t. I started bleeding and she grabbed my palm. Her skin was softer than mine, her hair, her pastel clothes, her posture, all softer. She stared through the mark I made like it was a peephole into a room of mirrors. We walked up to the playground monitor, my wounded hand in her reddened one. The supervisor’s eyes widened to accommodate the dent in her body, the unfair contrast of our arms and hands. “Megan, what has happened?”

 

She will tell her I did this. She will tell her I forced her. She will say it was my idea, and everyone will believe her. Without letting go, she told her we had fallen. She told her we had fallen together, but that only I was hurt.

 

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Story Telling Itself

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It takes so much

longer to fall up

-stairs and you

behind me

could have

done something.

 

The furniture in

the attic room

slouched under

the cracked ceiling.

 

It had been made

for a smaller kind

of standing.

 

Stripped down

in the dirty

river with nothing

better to do.

Compress me

into black and burn.

An experience

that’s not so out

of body where

I can hurt

back body hurt

body back please.

 

He helped me float

down to the street,

and the lamps

all knew.

 

The snow came

in fistfuls, threw

waxen blankets

over Toronto and froze

the CN tower

like a taciturn finger

to its lip. What I did

not say that night

turned cancerous.

 

Again, again

my body grew

sick of story

so localized it was

removed surgically.

 

Come here, girl.

You sing so beautifully.

I want to make you

feel like a star.