The moon is a cannibal:
she consumes her own body.
Flat-footed in her fatness,
she sweats and lumbers,
ashamed, in the pure of night,
of her vast heft.
She nibbles her flesh:
the taste is oily, repellant,
but she swallows it down:
the gulps rise in her gorge.
In a couple of weeks, she is half
the woman she was.
Then one night she wakes
and is nothing, a beautiful absence.
What sickness makes her suck
the darkness in and grow herself,
by increments, again?
The stars disdain her,
arrayed in their small perfection.
They are bundles of corners,
effortlessly, always.
Kitty Coles’ debut pamphlet, Seal Wife (2017), was joint winner of the Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Prize. Her first collection, Visiting Hours, will be published in 2020 by The High Window. www.kittyrcoles.com