Lunectomy

by Jack H. Marr

Once I was branded with the swelling moon.
It sank within me and gestated there,
obscene and useless, its twin satellites
pocked moonlets
pushing out their pearl-white parasite eggs
in mute optimism.

(In the sky the true moon, curved as horns,
looked down at me; he winked.
My parasite moon began a steady leak like grief:
thick tears.  Every lunation
a bloody hell.)

At last they pulled it from within me
the slick red threads and pinkish swell of it
as ominous (as innocent) as a tumour.
An impossible birth through
opened holes
cross-shaped gills black with
spider-stitches,
through the stretched-out ache.

The true moon settled there, where it had been:
An upturned crescent fierce and white
and blazed its bull-head light.

---

Jack H. Marr is a British writer, craftsman and recovering lawyer living in Montreal, where he hopes to one day learn to understand Canadians.  As an emigrant, a witch and a bi trans man, he knows a bit about the Queer skill of moving between worlds.

Read Jack's discussion of this poem over at the Roundtable!

Photography: Crescent Moon, by Luis Argerich.