NOCTURNE

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​​Maybe the grass is a choir of green, you said, and I almost

didn’t hear it because my mouth was full of salted crickets.

 

And maybe, I said, swallowing, the night sky is a choral gown,

hands on my breasts like measuring cups in a jar of sugar,

 

one size fits all. You almost didn’t see me because you were looking

at the moon. Was it any larger that night, I often wonder, not closer,

 

but larger? I was—I am—mortified by the moon’s largesse,

borrowed as it is, but why shouldn’t we give away

 

what was never ours? Thanks to you, I could smell the moon

like a peeled lime, the asphalt like a cracked pomegranate,

 

hear the idiot space between us babbling

like a brook. What then? My memory escapes

 

upstream. I can feel it stripping in the dark,

splashing, trying to get clean, I’m trying

 

to get clean. Maybe I never did anything wrong, I shout,

but I’m addressing the future, downwind. I hear no reply.

 

I have to close my eyes to keep from crying. And maybe you’d say—

tartly, gingerly, bottom lip almost brushing my earlobe—Maybe

 

the stars are regrets, but I can’t see them, don’t want to

feel them prickling my skin, as if they were calling

 

something inside me to come home,

something that at once obeys

 

and says, mellifluously, No.

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BIO: 

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Joshua Zeitler is a queer, nonbinary writer based in rural Michigan. They received their MFA from Alma College, and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Foglifter, wildness, The Shore, and elsewhere. They are the author of the chapbook Bliss Road (Seven Kitchens Press, 2025).