Snow Moon Over Ocean City, NJ

by Emari DiGiorgio

And the hungers are out.
Boardwalk shops shuttered for the season,
wind rattling padlocks and roll-down doors.

Here, in the bone moon, where I roam
snow-swept dunes, you appear: spector
of summer kitchens past, dragging

your chains–heavy clatter of cast iron pots–
through marram grass. Canning rings tumble
from wrists like bangles dropped.

The unmistakable walk of a fused ankle.
When you died I claimed the inoperable artifacts–
Royal standard typewriter and folding

Singer sewing table–when what I wish I took
were the letters bound and boxed beneath
the stairs, an unfinished afghan, some sense

of your penmanship and voice, something
to draw close. You haven’t come to haunt me.
You shuffle toward water’s edge where foam

swallows drifts whole, leaves the shore pocked.
In this light, I see straight through skin, your veins:
fraying cross-stitch of blue and purple asters.

Emari DiGiorgio is the author of Girl Torpedo (Agape, 2018), the winner of the 2017 Numinous Orison, Luminous Origin Literary Award, and The Things a Body Might Become (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She’s the recipient of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, the Ellen La Forge Memorial Poetry Prize, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, RHINO’s Founder’s Prize, the Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award, and a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She’s received residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Sundress Academy of the Arts, and Rivendell Writers’ Colony. She teaches at Stockton University, is a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poet, and hosts World Above, a monthly reading series in Atlantic City, NJ.

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