April was a good month – for poetry, anyway. After a two-month streak of rejections I thought would never end, I had two poems accepted. The first is an ekphrastic – a poem inspired by an image, in this case one from NASA – and the second is inspired directly by the moon (no telescope required).

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Space Station Crew Sees Lots of Clouds 
​
From up here it’s an oceanic birthday cake
these frosted tufts of cloud

makes you want to poke your finger in and lick
it right across the sugary mounds

of chemical-sweet butterscotch icing
gold-plated by the setting sun

then suck it through your teeth and tongue. Up here
we get lonely for such things.

Published in the Ekphrastic Review

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To the Horned Moon

How often I meet you here
above the trees and houses
nested in sleep, the edges

of you ringed, luminescent
as a dropped nickel in a pool
of crude oil. Copper-crowned

night, twilit and electric blue,
presiding above the world
unchallenged. What star

measures up to you? None
I know of. They are too far.
You, on the other hand,

so close I could
take you by the horns
wrestle you to Earth or

steer you forever
at ten million miles per hour
straight out of the universe.​

Published in Verse-Virtual