JAIDEN THOMPSON
DISSECTING THE MOON AS A SHITTY LOVER
In the smirk of dusk, the moon lies on my front porch. I ask to dissect her, to crack her open & pluck her insides like pomegranate seeds. She hands me a lung first, shoves it in my face as if I’m meant to eat it. I do —a plethora of moon dust that soaked the organ swarms my throat, like crows imitating Icarus, racing towards the guest room of my belly. This is where I store my confessions, in the cabinet labeled ‘POEMS’, though I read them as autopsies. Her grim floods the pages, pressing my words against the line, suffocating them. They simmer until the moon becomes a metaphor for nothing. So, I pick her up from the porch like a bruised fig, place her on the last page of my dirty notebook. & I devour her again, but with a scalpel. I rip through the left ventricle, spill a grubby blood cocktail on the page. Do you smell the must? Now, my blade kisses her, smooth— which is to say, I hollow her out; toss her entrails in a shredder, watch them split up into moonlit whispers, stomp them out, hush them until the sky stills & the dust knows not to shiver. I wrap her in the metaphor-stained page & kiss it, rough, pressing until my lips part & refuse to taste. I need another. & I offer this corpse as her confession, as if she did more than perfect shallow, paper graves.
Jaiden Thompson (they/them) is a young writer walking the line between poetic genius and foolery. They have work published or forthcoming in COUNTERCLOCK, Stone of Madness, AGNG and perhappened, among others. They are also an editor for Interstellar Literary Review. Learn more about them here: https://jaidenthompson.carrd.co