“The moon is a licked finger around a thin rim of glass.”

“I imagined the moon swallowing the bones into itself, as the desert sand absorbs a snakeskin.”

Is the light you appear to shed made of ghosts? Please circle one: Yes No

Lurking even lower, feeding these smaller nighttime demons, lives dense-shadowed shame.

Day routs the shadows and night gathers them back in with broad black-feathered wings. The Beaver Moon glows, reminding us that its longevity is not ours to know.

Every month time chews on the moon until it’s gone, and yet the moon returns.

How do we make sense of what it means to flee our home planet? What happens when technology allows us to do something before we understand what we’re doing?

The deep dark beginnings of our understanding and measuring of time—that great strange egg we all live in—involve the coupling of moon and blood.

July’s full moon seems to have a different texture, not chalk or concrete or glassy pear, but waxy, sweet, like nougat, like taffy.

The moon was born four and a half billion years ago. It’s been goddess, god, sister, bridge, vessel, mother, lover, other.

Tonight, the full moon is the closest it will be to earth all year, a big fat full supermoon. What will you see on its round white wall?

It’s April again, surging month, and the full moon rises tonight. What do you think of the moon?

Light a fire on this day. Let something burn. That is what the solstices are for.

Quilted, clutching, we wolve for one another, ice on the puddles and orange glow from windows against deepest evening blue.

Underworlds, otherworlds, so many passageways on this earth to elsewheres, especially during these weeks of the year.

Will it keep getting darker, will the darkness swallow me, will it swallow us all together?

I did not aim my attention on the sky because I was alone. I aimed my attention on the sky because I desired, and was afraid.

I am alone. That is why I know about being teased and turned on by the sky. Is this lucky? I decide yes.

How many languages does the rain speak? Is anyone fluent in all of them?

Know more, think more, ask more, listen. Rise, fall, fall again, fall better.

Sky blue. Please picture it. Put a swath of sky blue in your mind. Just for a moment.

I have been alone and because of my aloneness I have started a relationship with the sky.

How easy it is to go off course, to want to put the power in someone else’s hands.

Tonight, the light lasts and lasts. The solstice is a special day, irregular, when doors swing open that are otherwise closed. There are extra layers of possibility afoot. Open yourself, why not, ease yourself toward a more primal state of mind.

Everything is swelling, blooming, glowing, all about to burst, fertile, verdant, ready, wet. It’s summer!

Swimming offers an approximation of reentry. Is it possible to enter a body of water and not emerge altered in some way?

Let’s return to the screen door slamming, bare feet on the porch floor, peach juice sticky on the chin, sun on the back of your neck. You can return to a time of more time.

Then, blue heron sky. Then, green exists. Then, whisps of lapping clouds. Then, there are no words for the color of the clouds. Then, the branches, the tall blades of grass. Then, form exists. Then, light. Then, real morning. Good morning.

This is the dawn when you’ve been up all night drunk, on drugs, lunatic. The taste is sour. It is stale. It is the rotting tang of summer dumpsters. It tastes like sucking spilled whiskey from the sleeve of a wool sweater.

What does dawn smell like? Peach pit, licorice, bread, nests, sparks, blood. What does dawn smell like? Anticipation.

This is the second installment of a five-part series on the senses of dawn. Each piece (touch, sound, smell, taste, sight) will run at daybreak (EST) this week. May 28, 2018, Ghent, NY. 4:17 A.M. The silence is total. Pencil across graph p…

Our five-part series The Senses of Dawn will run at daybreak (EST) every day this week.

On revisiting Dubus’s female characters.     The man, who I will not name, had started his fifties but looked older, paunchy, with thinning curls. We overlapped for two weeks at a writing residency in another country. He was the head of …

We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday!“I’m in the November of my life,” said Francesca, a fifty-eight-year-old curator with good shoulders and dark lively eyes and dark wav…

This is the fifth and final installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s Novemberance column, which has run every Wednesday this month.   Some weeks ago, before the first frost, before the days got dark in the late afternoon, I took a walk in an unfamiliar p…

This is the fourth installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s Novemberance column, which will run every Wednesday this month.   The field where I played soccer before I had breasts was called Metacomet Park. A nylon net full of balls would be spilled on th…

This is the third installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s Novemberance column, which will run every Wednesday this month.   Three uncarved pumpkins the size of candlepin bowling balls stud the mulch in the front garden of a neighbor’s house on the sho…

This is the second installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s Novemberance column, which will run every Wednesday this month.   “I’m in the November of my life,” said Francesca, a fifty-eight-year-old curator with good shoulders and dark lively eyes …

This is the first installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s Novemberance column, which will run every Wednesday this month.   November is a hinge in the year, and the door gets opened to ghosts. It was a late fall weekend some years ago and lunch had g…