You Eat a Moon as a Metaphor for Pain
Here’s what’s going to happen: the moon is going to fall
out of the sky and land in the basketball court
in front of the apartment where your dad died.
You are going to swallow it.
Here’s what you are going to do: be buried
under the oak tree by the swing set in the back
garden of your old next-door neighbours.
Your name is scratched on its trunk.
Consider this your gravestone.
There’s your autopsy.
They cut you open and pull out a whole fucking moon.
There are things you hold inside of you nobody knows about.
Word from home is you’re walking around barefoot now:
this parched earth these blisters.
You tell people there’s something missing from the night sky;
nobody believes you.
Here’s what’s going to happen: the moon is going to
fall out of the sky and land right in your hands
as you stand alone at your best friend’s funeral.
You are going to swallow it.
Word from home is you are gluttonous:
king of the feast gristle between your teeth.
Everything is rotting in your fridge. The honey crystallises into dust.
You are devouring what you cannot bear to hold.
You are feasting on this blundering, thrashing weight inside you.
You are going to swallow it.
Word from Nasa is they’re missing a moon;
you know anything about that?
Freya Cook (she/her) is studying English at Durham University. She was commended as a top 100 poet in Foyles Young Poetry competition and was commended in the Young Poets’ Keats Challenge. Her work is based on family, loss and home.