CHRISTIE COLLINS

Moonstruck

My new lover wants me to watch as he peels
from his eyelids the strips of his dark lashes.
I find them later on his bedside table, blinking
one atop the other, bristles sharp as caterpillars.
 
Outside the window, the world continues to dim.
For years, a new moon hovered in the sky, obscuring
the faces, the once familiar valleys and vistas.
 
The next night my new lover removes his teeth.
One by one from his jaw, he twists each tooth
from its vine like a ripe grape, lets each drop
into the tiny porcelain dish on his boudoir.
His voice changes after but it does not age him.
 
I go to his window again and find what looks
like hope: a tender sliver of light in the sky, curved –
the makings of a crescent moon.
 
On the third night we make love. After, he perfects
the art of coming undone, hanging his curly mop
of hair from the banister. He appears taller
without hair and truer. The indents, grooves of his
skull revealing his tough, his fragile humanity.
 
Outside, the night has brightened: a first quarter
half moon. The sky studded with tinfoil stars.
I rest my cheek on his soft shoulder
as we look out onto our moonlit metropolis.
 
The more I come to know him, the more he reveals
to me his secret celestial cycle. By the time
he asks for my help lifting off his skin, I reach
my hands to him instinctively. I ask no questions.
We hang his skin in the closet around a hanger
like a garment bag. I behold his new form,
knowing then the raw bone and blood of him.
 
Nothing seems impossible anymore,
not on the night he asks for my help unclipping
his tongue and then dislodging his kind eyes.
Without his tongue, his spoken words become
guttural but glad. His eyes now free to roll
about our realm, see in full panoramic rotation.
 
In his own time and with my help, my new lover
and I deconstruct every part of him, each piece
of his puzzle put away in its own drawer, box,
jar, dish. His memories organized in file folders.
We rest together in the bed we now share, his
remaining form a mere kernel of light in my arms
under the brightest harvest moon the world’s ever
witnessed. Too bright to look backwards or to grieve.

Christie Collins is a PhD candidate in Creative and Critical Writing at Cardiff University in Cardiff, Wales. As part of her degree program, she teaches creative writing workshops and literature seminars for Cardiff University. She has also taught in the English departments at Mississippi State University and Louisiana State University. Her critical and creative work has been published in Kenyon Review Online, North Carolina Literary Review, Entropy, Cold Mountain Review, Chicago Review of Books, Canyon Voices, Appalachian Review, Poetry South, Poetry Wales, Still: The Journal, Wicked Alice, So to Speak, Phantom Drift, and Reunion: The Dallas Review. Her chapbook, titled Along the Diminishing Stretch of Memory, was published in 2014 by Dancing Girl Press, and her first full length collection of poems titled The Art of Coming Undone, which includes artwork by Erna Kuik, is forthcoming from Eyewear Publishing in 2021. "Moonstruck" is the title poem of this collection.