Super Moon
With Paige Elizabeth Wajda in ‘Heaven or Las Vegas’ from Issue 30, Spring 2021, we travel through the familiar and the unfamiliar, and the moon burns bright.
We are delighted to share with you another of Paige’s lovely — and lunar-themed — poems, which she has kindly gifted us here.
About ‘Moonwalk’, Paige tells us: “There are really way too many moon poems in the world. But has anyone ever thought about how obnoxious the moon is? I always think of the video game The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, where the moon creeps up on you the entire time and threatens to consume the world. It’s kind of like all the absurd expectations that come with being a woman.“
Moonwalk
by Paige Elizabeth Wajda
As a woman, god asks too much of me,
as a man, he couldn’t have handled me.
Thus am I suspended, in this gravity of expectation,
re-imagined as a sexless moonling, spirit-walking,
free of cumbersome horn-like organs, across a silvered landscape
which hides no squealing, writhing things.
Hallelujah that the mind can travel so many miles, bitter curses
when that same misogyny of cycles throws you into the pool.
Why would you trust someone who has a new face every night?
In my dreams I go further than anyone has before
and breathe the un-breathed air of Andromeda.
Not first woman, not first man, but first of my kind.
After all, how do we know it wasn’t a woman who invented fire?
Meanwhile, the moon still hovers, grinning like Majora’s Mask.
My ears pop; I orbit against my will.
I could never stand eating eggs.
The taste of fertility is too repellent.
To read ‘Heaven or Las Vegas’, and for more from Issue 30, visit our bookstore!
Paige Elizabeth Wajda is from California and a member of Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She spent four years teaching English in Poland before earning a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh. Her work has recently appeared in The London Reader, Passengers Journal, and Hit Points: An Anthology of Video Game Poetry, and in 2020 she was awarded a ‘Keep Art Alive’ grant from the California Desert Arts Council. Find her online at paigeelizabethwords.wordpress.com or on Instagram @rampaigewajda.
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