Splitting the Moon
The hour overripe, promising sweetness
that stings the tongue,
God split the moon in two.
Miraculous how cleanly
these cleaved halves
dimpled disbelief.
And what was there to prove?
What window was shuttered? What violence
had I not suffered?
Once sundered, we cannot mend it.
I am half-lit. Half-witted.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Hand me a knife: I’ll slice
and you choose the bigger or the brighter.
Love, let’s split the moon.
If I Were Meant to Live
I’d be living in a wave-licked palace
with turrets hunched in sleep.
When they woke, I’d be able to see
as far as the ends of time, infantile
and crawling toward me
on all their chubby limbs. Instead,
my dreams are flightless birds.
They are well-trained,
could once swim
before I let their muscles atrophy,
but I don’t want to move, or choose
between who I was and who I could be.
If you call my name, I will say
it was never my name. Not a lie,
I tell myself, but a deferred
lifeline. I stretch it between two pins
like a red string and stare a while, hoping
to conjure some connection. Truth,
I’ve learned from all my idle watching,
is a disjointed and senseless conspiracy;
metaphor, a codependency. I cut the string.
I don’t think it would’ve been red
if I were meant to live.
Joshua Zeitler is a queer, nonbinary writer based in rural Michigan. They are the author of the chapbook Bliss Road (Seven Kitchens Press, 2025), and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Foglifter, Nimrod, Shō, and elsewhere.
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“Love, let’s split the moon” is such a moving image: what we cut from ourselves and give away in love, and what remains when love changes.