Lunatic

I come from a long line of lunatics who treat madness as a gift after aeons of practice staring at the moon, any moon.

Waxing, waning, new or full, we telescope it in, feed on its vital essence as only moon-vampires do.

My Great, Great Grandfather prophesied for Old Moore’s Almanac. He knew what a cold day would bring, how snow struck at a mountain.

Our kind, talk to trees and expect answers. We see oceans in the sky and sky in the sea and puddles as windows to other worlds.

We are the ones that birds follow. They listen to our conversations, learn new songs to sing in the morning, forget them by evening time.

My father spoke of Cherokee said skin was burning stone. No amount of treatment would erase his non-encounter.

Nothing suppresses our lunacy, it is this we orbit and eclipse. If you wonder, do we walk among you? Check for odd socks and a slight twist in the corners of our gait.

by Sinéad McClure

Flickers of thinking flap into the dark

A tune plays itself clearly from nothing an echo of sometime Spiders click clack their legs building scaffolding to fish the air from

The buzz of muons dropping

* like pearls of lightning

* down

* through * and out of my head

* into the pillow

* make me jolt

* * I switch on the globe and read something anything noticing silence is never really silence

by Jessamine O’Connor

My kitchen. At 10pm.

Milk for hot chocolate is warming in a pan.

Phones on silent, hot water bottles filled.

Hannah says goodnight, and wraps her arms around me.

I place my hands on her thin waist, inhaling Daisy perfume.

Like squirrels storing nuts for winter, we store these nightly hugs in our memories, to draw on next year, when she’s away in university and I’m still herein my kitchen at 10pm.

by Anne Walsh Donnelly