I make (or Moonshining)

A Napkin Poem by Georgia Hertz

moonwater at the full moon and pray it fills me up,

or that it teaches me to glow from within – bioluminescence doesn’t

only belong to the sea, does it? I ask again: does

no one care to trawl along the shoreline for illumination anymore?

Search lights aim for any fellow ghosts we left behind, so

how, then, does the spirit shine in starless darkness?

in the eager void that gulps all down its great hulking maw?

not for its sustenance — worse — erasure? not an excavation but

instead a slow suck, a thieving glimmer of joy once close,

now wrenched away — all ripple, all sway, all sundry — a

glint on fickle tides and me, an anchor in newly wetted sand?

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Georgia Hertz is a queer artist, musician, and writer from the foothills of North Carolina. She is a recent graduate of Carlow University's MFA in Creative Writing program, based out of Pittsburgh, PA. Her works have been published most recently in HAD, Ballast, Frozen Sea, and Gleam. She can be found online at @thegeorgiamoon