Lee Nash - Recipe for a waning moon / I saw the orange moon

Recipe for a waning moon
(Stir well with a lemonwood spoon)

A petal from a past lover
(rose or bougainvillea)
A promise with a hollow ring
The watercourse that didn’t sing
Limbs uncoupled from their ghosts
Rude and ungracious hosts
Whatever’s dammed if it is
or damned if it isn’t
A bag of tricks and trawls
Close and unwanted calls
All that is putrid and rotten
Days that are best forgotten
The look that withered away
Four teaspoons of dismay
Five runes I do not understand
Brittle bones in a shaken hand
A pinch of treacherous impulse
Loathsome habits that repulse
Worrisome words that curl inside
Uncertainty that churns the bride
A kalpis of unbidden spite
A giant keeve of dying light
A bundle of figments to burn
Leaves from my heart about to turn






I saw the orange moon

The night I saw the orange moon
and ate it

I plunged my thumbnail into its waxy skin
squirted juicy meteors

peeled off the grey-white pith
and flung it to the cosmos

prized open the globe in my hands,
drank the bright seas
spat out the asteroid-sized pips.

Now there is a hollow
where the tranquil moon once hung

tides fail and children wait listless by the shore
with no waves to frolic in

all women are mad, thrown out of
their cycle.







Lee Nash lives in France and freelances as an editorial designer for a UK publisher. Her poems have appeared in magazines and e-zines including The French Literary Review and The Lake.  More of her work is forthcoming in Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Dawntreader, Silver Birch Press and Allegro Poetry.