Moonstruck & Other Poems
Nailah Mathews
moonstruck
the city below is red-wounded      burning.
purple haze fentanyl-laced, Â Â Â Â Â Â Â she tap dances on a cliff-face
                            the sort of thing you could fall in love with:
can’t sing, can’t dance, can’t right, but           Good God girl, where off earth
            Did you                  Come from?
No more than a baby with a wandering eye
letting two-cent morality                 from the boy on your rightÂ
goad you into cutting your throat
                                                 for his pictures.
       You were made in better hands than that.Â
night thief
sinead o’connor moon, barefoot in eastern ether
shrieks too late to stop what white rogue scorpion
                                       racing seven-legged
            to Joshua tree heaving comets cross the sky
                                                faster than god can blink –
fearsome fingersmith races seven-legged toward me.
Her heart is shrapnel in my lip               her heart a pelt of gunmetal stars
quivering cold, lonesome as god’s revolver
                        like mint deliquesced and pooled on the floor of
her mouth, a mouth which inverts all known laws.
                             this altitude defangs us, and makes us feral
aurorabore|atlasÂ
take me to that infinity   pink ripe with pears          green with wishing
where birth collapses death        where cataracts never          bloom
where we covet     one another     like knives
                                                    where summer imploded,
and the ochards ranneth over, Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â and nine of the seven days
                                                           we was plagued.
take me somewhere where the teeming meek inherited a rancid earth,
                                           where this poem is not self-consciousÂ
and has already coughed the water     out of its lungs,
                                                   and is ready to begin where patience begets savagery
somewhere where my sweet tooth                        is a passing reference
                                 to my lack of self-restraint.
                        somewhere where, with a face like that, you better turn to poetry.
Nailah Mathews is a nonbinary Black poet to whom books and Black lives matter. A 2022 Periplus Fellow, their poetry has been featured in Tilde~A Literary Journal, Lucky Jefferson, Passenger Journal, and Penumbra Literary and Art Journal among others. You can read their work at nailahwritesnovels.com.
*Image by Nick Owuor on Unsplash
