Moons
Mag Gabbert
| poetry
for Chen Chen
A fathom used to mean the furthest distance a person could reach.
A yawn—like chasm, chaos, or hiatus—is another name for space.
Chiasma: inside the globe of the brain, there is a dark place where
two hemispheres meet. The French say that dusk falls in-between
two kinds of beasts. Horny bodies. Bodies that cannot make their
own heat. The arc of a flung fist. The way a dog circles before it
sits down. Eyes lined with blue crescents because the phone rings
and rings. An open mouth. Commas, especially when they separate
two or more items in a list: a boy, a beacon, a buoy. It’s like I’ve
been running, all night, beside myself.
Mag Gabbert is the author of Sex Depression Animals (Mad Creek Books, forthcoming in 2023), which won the Charles B. Wheeler Prize and includes some of the work published here. Mag is a 92Y Discovery Award recipient; she teaches at Southern Methodist University.