Erica Anderson-Senter

Breaking Up on The Moon

 

We are weighed down with the want of each other exactly 16 percent less here. I swallow teaspoons of gravity while we are here. Starlings suspended above our heads, faintly out of reach. Atmosphere out of reach. Who brought birds to the moon, I ask? The lines of my body, blurring against the bare sky, quietly come apart: soft fat of my thigh, slope of my heel, curve of my calf press against the hollow hallway of black. I can’t remember how we got here. Did we bring those birds? Rolling our failed intentions between our fingertips we are polite with one another, saying, You have dust on your face, let me get that for you.

 

Genesis

 

In the beginning somehow sound, somehow death, somehow sex,

somehow the lost sparrow of perfect sound,

somehow a dissertation
on particular flight patterns in iamb—

you know,   I can’t,    belong,    exist,

implode,     destroy,

somehow no anxiety, somehow only hazy woe.

Creation is regretful, it is disquiet

and somehow, in the beginning,

it never began.

We bump into each other in the dark.

 

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Erica Anderson-Senter lives and writes in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Pieces have appeared in Specter and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Her chapbook, seven days now, was published by The Dandelion Review. Erica hosts free literary events throughout her city to bring art to the public. She finished her MFA in Creative Writing in 2016 through the Writing Seminars at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont.