Many Moons Ago
Is childhood.
Is the cloak of time grown loose about the body. Where snug is certain, a story slips off the night’s cool shoulders.
Is to say a memory has begun to sink into the clouded horizon. Memory, that giddy moon. Opaque runaway. Burnished obscurant.
Is to say lunar, and the lunar eclipse of the clearest distinctions.
Is to say months have passed, though for every twelve are thirteen moons.
Such incongruities—these checkered squares against that lacy sky. The frothy sunrise that follows on the moon’s blue heels.
Over the Moon
Joyous hiatus. Abdication of ordinary sense.
That catapulted ekstasis—-outside the self, into the atmosphere, afar.
Human cannonball of longing shot, spun, requited.
In passing, the first star to the right, and straight on till morning.
Though not straight exactly—the curved footprints of the moon, her silver ellipsis of orbit. A glimpse of the dawn’s early light.
Now the moon-girl glows incandescent before you, becoming her own halo.
See how she shivers in the great Cadillac of night.
The stars arrange themselves like a love story filmed on black-and-white reversal.
Huddle close on the bench seat of Beyond.
Once in a Blue Moon
Rare as the granted wish. The fire started with first strike.
Quicksand. Amnesia. An old-fashioned telephone booth. The free lunch.
The wise tooth. The natural look. Quill pens. Papyrus. Penny
candy. The fact of a doorframe. The carrying across a threshold.
Player pianos. The piccolo. An embarrassment of riches. An unmarked
territory. Rotary clubs. Come-as-you-are parties. Washing dishes to
pay off the bill. Faux stocking lines drawn with eyebrow pencil. The
pavement uncracked. The jacket bedazzled. The lemon sweet as Tang.
The clang of cymbals on the city street. A time capsule. A time
machine. A truly torrential downpour. The successful pyramid scheme.
The clean motor lodge. Snowfall in Los Angeles. The first love. The
last word. The whole story. And the kiss to build a dream on, after
all.
*
Born in Seattle in 1979, Julie Marie Wade
completed a Master of Arts in English at Western Washington University
in 2003, a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh
in 2006, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities at the University of
Louisville in 2012. She is the author of Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press, 2010; Bywater Books, 2014), winner of the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir; Without: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2010), selected for the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Series; Small Fires: Essays (Sarabande Books, 2011), selected for the Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature; Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems (White Pine Press, 2013), winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series; Tremolo: An Essay (Bloom Books, 2013), winner of the Bloom Nonfiction Chapbook Prize; When I Was Straight: Poems (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014); SIX (Red Hen Press, 2015), winner of the To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize; and Catechism: A Love Story (Noctuary Press, 2016). A regular book reviewer for The Rumpus and Lambda Literary Review,
Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International
University. She is married to Angie Griffin and lives in Dania Beach.