THREE TIMES, THREE NIGHTS These days we take the moon for granted. The moon is more a place than a thing, and we’ve been there, done that. No new illuminations to catch like beams in a jar. Little to carry home. Few still dance to assure the moon will follow on the heels of the sun; fewer still call on the moon in their efforts to move the earth. The moon has been reclassified, demoted, a mundane satellite common as a pocketbook mirror, stripped of her power. Someone could replace the moon while we’re not looking with any round, shiny object. We’re too busy finding out the new, we’d never notice. So the stretching of our worlds makes us poorer. We know more, are intimate with less. But once a woman with love curling like smoke inside her could sit lonely in slate-black night three nights – her eyes pulling down the moon, her body drawing light like a magnet – could find in the moon a piece of herself and, saying a wayward man’s name three times, three nights, could call him home.
Terri Niccum’s full-length collection, The Knife Thrower’s Daughter is due in June 2022 from Moon Tide Press. She is also the author of the chapbooks Dead Letter Box (Moon Tide Press) and Looking Snow in the Eye (Finishing Line Press). Niccum was a finalist and runner-up for the 2020–2021 Steve Kowit Poetry Prize and a semi-finalist in the 2021 Knightville Poetry Contest. Her work has recently appeared in the San Diego Poetry Annual 2020-2021; Making Up, an anthology published by Picture Show Press; Nimrod International Journal; Golden Streetcar; The Maine Review; Oberon Poetry; 2020 Forever; and Redshift 5. She is married to singer-songwriter Bob Niccum and they are part of an eclectic music group called The Others.
All rights © Terri Niccum
a moon of one's own 