Size / / /

. . . I have it right here
under my arm,
wrapped in a notebook
leaking light,
and am coming toward you
with a poem it helped me write . . .

"Taking Back the Moon"—Duane Ackerson

Now that I have it,

what will I do with it?

Will anyone want it back,

or even notice it's missing?

It was just one little moon among many,

the one that shines

for lunatics, lovers, and poets,

the almost-outdated Shakespearian moon,

an anachronism about to be remaindered

before I recalled it.

I left all the other moons in place:

the inventor's moon, constantly reinventing itself,

the actor's moon, out to steal the inventor's masks,

the saint's moon, pale and sometimes drawn

like a child's artwork,

the sorceror's moon gone out for a spell,

the realtor's moon awaiting developments,

the scientist's moon throwing the light of discovery

over half the earth and peeking around

to see what's in back of all the dark.

The list is endless, Horatio:

who knows how many more moons circle the planet?

More than ever circled Jupiter,

each with its own array of satellites on earth.

Music lifts into the night,

assembles itself into a moon—

possibly THE MOON,

maybe a false one,

foxfire designed to lead us

deeper into the swamp

the wrong words

followed by the wrong deeds

have provided us.




Duane Ackerson's poetry has appeared in Rolling Stone, Yankee, Prairie Schooner, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Cloudbank, alba, Starline, Dreams & Nightmares, and several hundred other places. He has won two Rhysling awards and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Salem, Oregon. You can find more of his work in our archives.
Current Issue
25 Mar 2024

Looking back, I see that my initial hope for this episode was that the mud would have a heartbeat and a heart that has teeth and crippling anxiety. Some of that hope has become a reality, but at what cost?
to work under the / moon is to build a formidable tomorrow
Significantly, neither the humans nor the tigers are shown to possess an original or authoritative version of the narrative, and it is only in such collaborative and dialogic encounters that human-animal relations and entanglements can be dis-entangled.
By: Sammy Lê
Art by: Kim Hu
the train ascends a bridge over endless rows of houses made of beams from decommissioned factories, stripped hulls, salvaged engines—
Issue 18 Mar 2024
Strange Horizons
Issue 11 Mar 2024
Issue 4 Mar 2024
Issue 26 Feb 2024
Issue 19 Feb 2024
Issue 12 Feb 2024
Issue 5 Feb 2024
Issue 29 Jan 2024
Issue 15 Jan 2024
Issue 8 Jan 2024
Load More
%d bloggers like this: