Content Warning: blood, death

Clare Marsh – Cold Moon

My grandmother felt the full moon’s pull

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spoke of its monthly summons from sleep.

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Without knowing the lunar phase

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now I’ve become sensitised – 

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beached at the high-water line

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of dreams, the glow around

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tight-closed curtains a siren call.

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Revealed on the sill my moongazing hare

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basks blissful in twilight – a reminder

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of one racing over Northumbrian fields

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under a blood-red lunar eclipse.

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In the frosted orchard leached of colour

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skeleton trees become moon-dial gnomons

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shadow-ladders cast across a silver landscape.

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My grandmother felt the full moon’s pull

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its gravitational tug on fluid in every cell,

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in every artery, tidal surges and bulges,

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the flow and ebb, the embolism –

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the not waking as the Cold Moon waxed to full.  

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Florence Marsh 25.12.1900 – 4.12.1976

December’s full moon is known as the Cold Moon.

Clare Marsh is an international adoption social worker. In the past year her writing appeared in Ink, Sweat and Tears, Flash Flood, Pure Slush, Places of Poetry and won the Olga Sinclair Prize. She was awarded M.A. Creative Writing (University of Kent 2018) and nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2017. @cmarshwriter

Photograph: Waxing Gibbous by James Harris

James Harris isn't a photographer; he's a walker who takes photos, usually at stupid o’clock in the morning. Instead of travelling afar, he walks the streets, pathways, parks and beaches of his native Kent, UK, to capture the beauty that sometimes lies just outside the vision of those who don’t have a camera ready in their hands. When he’s not walking, he’s waging battles against computers which he will never win, but at least he gets paid for it.