and though she is in bed in her rhino nightgown
and I’m in shorts and a T-shirt and the dark
is cold as a rocket pop we still pull on shoes
and he drives in silence with nothing to see
until turning the corner where the moon hangs
so low huge yellow it is a guilty sun caught
past curfew wedged between the senior center
and the ice cream shop its cratered body paved
smooth with borrowed light and it’s worth
the rushing the shivering our daughter pleading
for a sundae while he holds the wheel tight
says that he didn’t want us to miss it to not
know outside the night looks like this
About this poem:
“A few years ago, my husband came home late in the evening and said the moon was bigger, brighter, and lower than he’d ever seen. We couldn’t see the moon from our yard, so we drove around until we found it (right near Cool Licks Creamery in North Providence). I wrote the poem without punctuation to try and convey the rush of that moment. I wanted to capture the awe of seeing that particular moon with my family and to consider what I might have missed on all the nights I never even went outside.”
About the poet:
Julie Danho’s poetry collection, Those Who Keep Arriving, won the 2018 Gerald Cable Book Award from Silverfish Review Press, and her work has appeared in publications such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Bennington Review, and Poetry Daily. She has been awarded fellowships from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and the MacColl Johnson Fund. More of her work is available at juliedanho.com.
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