sovay | There's a low moon caught in your tangles

On the drive up from New Haven to Boston, the moon was a true harvest moon, if a few months late and a slice off full: as burnt-gold as Bradbury pumpkins and the size of a new penny, and it took a moment for me to distinguish it from the sodium streetlights along the exit ramp at the rest stop. (My brain on lunar phenomena: Is that the moon? Wow. My God. That's the moon.) I watched a lunar eclipse once as a child, from the hillside of Robbins Farm, as the moon turned copper against smoke-blue evening over the skyline of downtown Boston. I watched another through a telescope on Cross-Campus, last fall, with a cellphone full of fanatic Red Sox fan to my ear and my eyes on the shadow slowly clouding over the moon. World Series, hey, I'm watching a dragon devour the moon here! I talked with a white-haired astronomer with a tweed jacket and a bicycle, who might have walked out of one of the stories I love; and the crowd came and went, studying the sky. I love nights like that. This wasn't so bad either.

My limited-edition copy of Caitlín R. Kiernan's Frog Toes and Tentacles arrived today, and it's almost too beautiful to read; bound in black and stamped with crimson foil, neat as a candy box. I read the False Starts chapbook first, by way of revving the engine. The illustration for "Pages Found Among the Effects of Miss Edith M. Teller" is very promising.

I have sold another poem to The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, "The Wandering Ghosts." Those curious about its origins should see the photographs posted by

erzebet, particularly "A Stream in the Wood" and "Mother's Mirror." Meanwhile,

lesser_celery geeks out academically: I can think of no one more suited to write an end-of-life chapter than he.

I have final grades to input, and then it's reading till February. For once in its life, the Christmas cactus is blooming on time.

There's a low moon caught in your tangles

no subject