Crescent Moons
When the forensics nurse inspected me, she couldn’t
see the tenderness he showed me after. My walk home
squirmed sore with night. I passed the earthworms
displaced to sidewalk, their bodies apostrophed
in the sun. I did not anticipate a grief
so small, my noun of a prayer, Eat dirt to make dirt.
Took a man’s hand as he led me to cave. So long
as I breathed, I could huff violets in his dank, practice
earth’s gasp. Mother lifts daughter, daughter casts
look at camera, a killer, a stick in the mud. I hold
my own hand. When the forensic nurse inspected
me, I described the house, historic blue. Asked me
to push my hips down. Little crescent moons
where his nails stabbed into me. She gave me
the word abrasion so gently I offered consent. Blue
as the moon when I sighed wait, blue as the no of my
throat. Abrasion, possibly extended form of red.
Harm results in a starry night too, many galaxies
scraped under the nail of a heavenly body. Ah my
second earth, its wounds hardened into swallowed
prophylaxis, an injection pooling between muscle
and skin. A woke seed. Deadarmed anti-moons
aggregated. A storm can travel seeds up to 30 miles
away. They dust on the sidewalks like lost data.
He did not intend Did not. Bloody speculum
a telescope searching the angry night sky for proof.
Copyright © 2019 by Natalie Eilbert. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 21, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“After I was assaulted, when the sexual assault nurse examiner (SANE) administered the rape kit, she used words matching the natural landscape of earth to describe my wounds. There is much to connect between a woman’s ruptured body and our ruptured earth, neither of which has much recourse for justice, recovery, or prevention. I urge you to support your local domestic abuse shelter, and help victims and survivors achieve some modicum of safety.”
—Natalie Eilbert