The Far Side of the Moon is Another Form of Absence
–after Luisa A. Igloria
by Lorraine Rice
Mostly I return the cold shoulder
with a coiled tongue of distrust. I
want to believe without the burden of proof
but fear faith is for hairless, mewling animals
all a-huddle, warm bodies pressed one to another
in a woven bowl of dried grass and plastic strips,
certain of return, the mushed up worm. I once tried
feeding my baby this way, chewing what she couldn’t,
breaking braids of meat to mash, then passing
the pulp, nutrients from my mouth to hers.
J says we became the parents we needed,
and I wonder what this means for my children
made of me but defiantly not me, what it reveals
of those who did and didn’t raise my father and mother.
Sometimes I wake with a phantom flutter
in my gut, a tingling in my breasts. For a moment
I forget and slip between the bald walls of hours
into decades spent. Sometimes I wake cradling myself,
my newborn self, five pounds of jaundiced rage.
But I don’t mind the holler, I welcome it, marvel—
how it fills this empty room swimming in silver light.
Blackout shades only ever half-raised
so the moon can reach me and I might,
in a flash of grace, catch it turning.
Lorraine Rice is a writer and mother originally from South Carolina, currently based in Philadelphia. She is the recipient of fellowships and support from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, and Kimbilio Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Beloit Poetry Journal, Gulf Coast, the anthology Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive (Nightboat Books, 2025), and elsewhere.
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