Cynthia Marie Hoffman
12 Moon Funeral
I am vacationing in the county of doors.
On the third floor, my bedroom door
opens to the night, a black room
where a vinyl record plays the call of an owl.
I have this recurring dream
I’m stuck in a stairwell
where the hatch above my head
is too small to squeeze through.
Today, I climbed the spiral staircase
in the lighthouse tower. I had to squeeze
through the hole in the floor of the lantern room.
Far below, waves banged their heads
on the rocky shore. My baby was stuck
for 25 hours, a lunar day. I didn’t want
to be cut open, all seven layers of tissue
like a door inside a door inside
a door, until finally a door was opened
to the room where the baby swam
inside. Today, my mother says she’s going
to a 12 moon funeral. I made it through
the opening at the top of the lighthouse stairs
and walked the widow’s walk around the tower,
clutching the railing, nodding to the shipwreck
miles offshore and the souls who went
down with it, suspended in their watery room
beneath the locked door of the lake’s surface.
Every night, I open the night door
to the moon, until one night, there is no moon.
They call this a new moon. But it’s really the end
of something. The end of a month, the end of
a life, the end of light. My mother meant to say
the funeral is at noon. I’m late. Deep in the forest,
a woodpecker knocks and knocks.
Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Exploding Head, as well as Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones, Paper Doll Fetus, and Sightseer, all from Persea Books. Essays in TIME, The Sun, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. Poems in Electric Literature, The Believer, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere. Cynthia lives in Madison, WI. www.cynthiamariehoffman.com.