An Experiment with Artificial Moons

Will there be blood?
Red rays kindled on the rim
of a shadow against the dark,
and falling back—will there sometimes be
a thumbnail crescent and a gibbous ghost
bouncing between faces
like the shared gaze of aging lovers holding hands?
What new flocks will form
and wheel and cry,
which brittle wings will flap endlessly,
and beat against what,
until exhaustion takes them?
Will we begin to walk instead of sleeping,
my bedtime coffee turned quaint,
will it be fragmented or in step,
and where will we find to go?
Will paintings become lamps, or windowshades?
Maybe I am projecting a ghoulish, hackneyed greed
for delineation and digress
on a world that requires neither
and wants only to live in the light,
but I can’t seem to stop asking,
pawing at the ground as if it were my itch to scratch.
Where will the terminator fall
between light and light, and
will it be as surgical
as the removal of a ruptured vestige
without fault or decay,
at what long angle will the shadows of glass rest,
and how will I know
whether or not my eyes
are closed?

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Tegan Blackwood’s poems have appeared in The Write Launch and The Hamilton Stone Review. She recently won Sequestrum Magazine’s New Poets Award.