Content Warning: blood, injury
Lorelei Bacht - The Pomegranate Moon
The moon made itself a parchment, rolled up
its translucence and tied it with a piece of string.
It tucked itself in my sister’s wicker basket
and said: Walk me out to my happening.
And together they walked a silence without stars
among laurels, pomegranates and pines.
Having ran out of green, they found the steep
ravine where the sea beats and sings into granite.
The moon hissed: Let me down. Can you not see
the wound lacing me chest to throat,
each beat gushing a thousand red petals? I am
no longer me, nor is my house mine anymore.
Doing as told, my sister let the moon, now cold
as tears down into the low rumbles of the sea,
while the wind carried the taste of basil, wove
its blues into the song of drunken owls.
This poem contains motifs from ‘Romancero gitano’, a poetry collection by Spanish writer Federico García Lorca, first published in 1928.
Lorelei Bacht (she/they) is currently running out of ways to define herself, and would like to reside in a tranquil, quiet form of uncertainty for a while. Her recent work has appeared and/or are forthcoming in Anti-Heroin Chic, Visitant, The Wondrous Real, Abridged, Odd Magazine, Postscript, PROEM, SWWIM, Strukturriss, The Inflectionist Review, Hecate, and others. She is also on Instagram: @lorelei.bacht.writer and on Twitter: @bachtlorelei
Photograph: Buck Moon, Thunder Moon, Hay Moon by Tina Hagger
Tina Hagger is an artist based in Kent, England. She is primarily a linocut printmaker but dabbles in many art forms. She is heavily influenced by the county of her birth, Kent, and its beautiful countryside. She particularly loves a wander in the North Kent marshes. As a result, many of her artworks have a theme of the interplay between nature and place. She holds her sense of wonder at nature very dear.