“Moon Stone, Please Touch” by Mary Alexandra Agner
(EPUB | MOBI)
Moon Stone, Please Touch
reads the placard at the Air and Space Museum,
warmed by all the palms and knuckles
streaming through revolving doors. Basalt
brought back by the few who’ve touched
lunar landscape: canals, dusty imprint of water;
silica stealing fingerprints. The whorls and ridges
trapped in my skin engrave themselves in
stone under the pressure of my hand, flowering
out in the shape of a snail shell, a hollow
spiral of a fossil whose presence now
argues for ice on the Moon which melted,
trickled down to the impact crater whose fury
first pummeled the ice and rock into liquid
warpaint; even the slow snail traversing the cooling
planet has smeared its face in this.
| Mary Alexandra Agner writes of dead women, telescopes, and secrets. Her latest book of poetry is The Scientific Method; her short stories appear in Oomph and the Journal of Unlikely Cryptography. She can be found online at www.pantoum.org. |