Buck Moon

Abstract

Buck Moon Meghan Moya Finn (bio) How could you have died in high summer berries wetand beaches pouring over crystal water slick white zinc screensmell of your hands smearing me protectivelywhen I was your child How could you while I was eating seared scallopsand drinking fine bubbly wine in a tavern called Blackfish?You look younger than ever, my good friend had saidacross the white tablecloths. ________ On the full Buck Moon of Julywhen young deer get their antlers I lostmy mother but not once,shed her, snake-like, all my life. They were calling it a super moon, a bloodmoon, and your blood was splashing into the whitevessel of the toilet bowl in Albany, New York Your body become a flood, the metals in itsought their way back to the groundmagnetizing and on your knees it happened. You white vesselholy mother, speared. On your knees, a great emptying occurredand what wild prayers were they,flowing from the mouthout of the heart, from its four seas— what waters were those? [End Page 294] ________ Was it redder than a lobster claw or blacklike mud? I didn't see your blood, I didn'tsee the paddles placed on the chest lateover the emptied heart. While you were touched by a paramedicI was having halibut in butter sauce, already over, the river runthe contents of your interior life madevisible in the bowl. That night the wine flowed into meand out of you The thick night,the night to be felt. ________ The moon was full and super—a Buck Moon, thunder moon.You did those things I bet you thunderedand bucked, a deer bleats didn't you?Or was it calm as the eyes of cows? Me with my oyster my saying thisis the world and isn't it saltyand sweet? I sang like a fool in the night,I feasted. [End Page 295] Meghan Moya Finn Meghan Moya Finn is a writer, translator and amateur field naturalist based in Massachusetts. She holds a Masters of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School and has received residencies from the Banff Centre, Vermont Studio Center, and the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest. Copyright © 2022-2023 Pleiades and Pleiades Press