Rachel Stempel

Have we not finished grieving?

​When I corset-stitched The Moon back
together, she cast her gray-glow at the
wrong angle through a window stained
with earth.

At first, the animals were a little
skeptical.

The Moon doesn’t have bad angles,
they sung, a mutinous choir.

The Moon doesn’t know bad angles, I
said and still say and will say again. We
never know what we’re capable of.

When The Moon cast herself at the
wrong angle, the animals raced to her
feet, lapping up what little light she
gave.

I told them stories about The Moon I
read once from a No Longer text,
before the angel numbers
reconfigured our geometry.

No Longer, I told them, meant The
Moon wouldn’t remember Before.

Nor the clandestine lovers who cut
their hair just to bury it.

Nor our shared sing-song breath.

They trusted me then, the animals. Me,
the night hag of the Nephilim,
sentenced to small disclosures of No
Longer.

But they clocked my poor needlework
when the oven clock flashed 11:11 and
I became a tiger in the spotlight.

---

--
Rachel Stempel is a genderqueer Ukrainian-Jewish poet and PhD candidate in English at Binghamton University. They are the author of the chapbooks Interiors (Foundlings Press, 2021) and Before The Desire To Eat (Finishing Line Press, 2022). They currently live in New York with their rabbit, Diego.