[Alexandra Baez]

Full Sturgeon Moon


It tightens like a screw
and twists the night.
I bulge, I leak—in moments I will spew
the best and worst of all my wild-hair ways.

This swollen moon outpours; its light-shafts strew
an urgent strangeness through the chasmic sky.
My inner rhythms slip askew
as through the windows, sunlike moonlight stirs
a silver see-or-stumble-by-it stew.

It gulps the searing Perseids and swallows.
Cartwheeling nebulae! A loon dog howls.

I scour myself for visions, find a slew
by two a.m., stack up the witch-kid lot
on tabletops. Here’s trouble, there’s a clue:

the black has birthed a cool, pervasive light—
and now the hem of wrong looks halfway right.


Supermoon, August 11, 2022




Revisions:
epigraph removed
title was "Moonsqueeze," then "Full Sturgeon Supermoon 2022"
S1L2--was "on me tonight," then "too high to fight;" then "and" was "that"
S2L2--"chasmic" was "trackless"
S2L3--was trying provisional trochaic adverbs before "askew" for rhythm
S2L3--was "Normal inner rhythms slip askew"
S3--lines were in reverse
S3L1--"loon" was "mad"
S3L2--was "abroad. The searing Perseids get swallowed," then "the searing light of Perseids gets swallowed"
S4L3--"changeling" was "witch-kid," then the reverse
S4 L3--colon was semicolon
endnote removed


Original

Moonsqueeze
August Supermoon, 2022

As above, so below.
—The Emerald Tablet (paraphrase)


It tightens like a screw
on me tonight.
I bulge, I leak—in moments I will spew
the best and worst of all my wild-hair ways.

This swollen moon outpours; its light-shafts strew
an urgent strangeness through the trackless sky.
Normal inner rhythms slip askew
as through the windows, sunlike moonlight stirs
a silver see-or-stumble-by-it stew.

Cartwheeling nebulae! A mad dog howls
abroad. The searing Perseids get swallowed.

I scour myself for visions, find a slew
by two a.m., stack up the witch-kid lot
on tabletops. Here’s trouble, there’s a clue;

the black has birthed a cool, pervasive light—
and now the hem of wrong looks halfway right.





An astrologer noted about this full moon: “[T]he sun in regal Leo and the moon in eccentric Aquarius are locked in a tense T-square aspect with wild child planet Uranus . . . [whose] chaos-loving influence tends to bring about unpredictability and sudden shifts . . . This planetary alignment also activates the North and South Nodes of Destiny, forming what’s known as a grand cross in astrology . . . [which] makes the events of this full moon feel even more fated and important for your future. If you . . . march to the beat of your own drums now, you may find yourself heading in a totally different and more aligned direction than you could have imagined before.” (Nina Kah, “The Spiritual Meaning Of The August 2022 Full Sturgeon Moon,” Bustle, August 4, 2022, https://www.bustle.com/life/spiritua...-sturgeon-moon.)