The Sturgeon Moon
Widened, a white pupil
over the yard, as my grandmother
hung rattlesnake skins.
Her fingertips worked
in the quiet grammar of ceremony.
I remember the scent first:
drying pepper, faint venom,
the sap-sweet musk of cedar;
a blend that lived in her clothes
and followed her through the house.
Sometimes she hummed,
barely audible.
Sometimes she worked in silence,
the kind that makes you look inward
for a place to put your eyes.
And beneath that broad-mouthed moon,
I began to see:
These were not tasks,
but continuances.
I stand behind her,
barefoot on cool planks,
feeling the night
reach its long fingers
between us.
She does not turn,
but I know she senses me
the way a tree knows a bird
has landed in its crown.
When morning finally comes—
thin, ash-coloured,
soft with the promise of heat,
she gathers what has dried enough
to hold its shape
and leaves the rest
for another moon.
I am built on unanswered things
The carapace,
the echo of bone learning its purpose,
the long solitude of a creature
that carries its house like a wound.
They say all vertebrate embryos
begin the same. Yet, only mine
lets the shoulder blades wander,
sliding inward like hesitant rivers
before the ribs bend and fold—
hardening into a wall
of absence, of restraint.
For years, I thought it was a shell.
Only later did I understand
it is the negative space,
the hollow the bones refused to fill,
that kept me alive.
Why the body waits so long
to learn its own design—
I cannot answer.
I was made for enduring, not explaining.
Everything I know comes from pressure:
the deep, unlit hours when water
feels like origin,
and the world above is merely rumour.
I hear it
as a kindred thing, an old riddle
moving through the sea’s spine,
searching for a listener.
A patient creature, I continue
in slow armour of questions,
swimming the seam
between what the body reveals
and what it refuses to say.
The shell is never mine alone:
It is shaped by absence,
by what will not become flesh.
I am built for endurance,
for an unrecorded life,
for the quiet economies of survival.
Every movement a negotiation,
a testament
that nothing soft
ever vanishes entirely.
That Morning in Athens
Sweet olive ghosts in,
barely a scent;
just a suggestion,
a warm, narcotic vapor.
Feral and unguarded,
unmasked, startled
by our hunger, held
in the amber resin of now.
Somehow your skeletal
denim loosens, drops
to the floorboards, and
we turn wholly to pillows,
facing each other like
two starving jackals
tracking the moon’s
blue cartilage. Joy—clean,
sudden—flares through us,
a bright, ragged surge
moving through the body:
animal, involuntary,
a sound we cannot stop,
a place where everything
is possible, where nothing
has yet been named. And so
we make love again,
as if the world had
fallen to embers,
as if it were only
a small shelter rising
in the dark, built
moment by moment.
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image: Stine86Engel
