The moon swallowed the sun.
What a splendid way
to start my day!
She munched him for five long days—
or were they nights?—
then caught the stars
one after the other,
with a crisp,
chameleonic tongue.
Two weeks for the job.
I watched her, thrilled,
from behind my pink curtains.
Perverse and plump,
the moon unrooted some pine trees
to pick her golden teeth,
crashing big chunks
of the North Star
over my garden.
Too bad for my lilies…
But she wasn’t full, no!
She ate all the planets:
Mars, Neptune, Venus—
vanished
into her visceral mouth.
Then, fat and tired—
much, much fatter than my aunt Suzy—
she burped a comet—almost hitting my roof,
and took a nap in the sky’s smoky armpit.
She snored for months…
“Give me a break!” I shouted,
but she didn’t care, no! shamelessly shaking
the sky’s skinny chest.
Huge, hot, and harsh,
she woke up with a start—a nightmare, I hope!
and thought it was time to have a drink:
the Milky Way! Like a new-born, she giggled—
what a joy to suck from your mother’s breast
at four point five billion years old!
She scratched her obese belly,
hungry still.
Galaxy after galaxy she gobbled—
like my uncle Mark, red
mullets. Meteorites stuck to her sweaty
skin like fireflies,
so in a foggy nebula, she showered.
Patient, I polished my poem,
then my nails, and put on eyeshadow
in the moonlight.
Adriana Morgan completed a Ph.D. in French Literature at the University of Letters in Nantes, France. She is fluent in six languages and worked as a translator and terminologist at the European Commission in Luxembourg and the United Nations in New York. She taught French at the University of Jamia Milia Islamia, New Delhi, India, the French Alliance and the Universities of Valparaiso and Vina del Mar, Chile. She currently works as a multi-dimensional artist: painter, poet, and children’s picture books writer and illustrator. She is the first prize winner of the Midnight Mozaic Fiction (Medium, 2019), one of the selected winners of the Canadian poetry contest—Quebec and the Francophony, and second prize winner of the Daniil Pashkoff International Poetry Contest, 2018, Germany.
Sparks of Calliope 