Jessica Barksdale

Jessica Barksdale’s sixteenth novel What the Moon Did was published February 2023 by Flexible Press. Her short story collection Trick of the Porch Light is forthcoming in 2023. She’s published two poetry collections: When We Almost Drowned (2019) and Grim Honey (2021). She taught at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California and continues to teach for UCLA Extension and in the online MFA program for Southern New Hampshire University. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband. http://www.jessicabarksdaleinclán.com

The Chinese Balloon Incident

My mother tells me the moon is in danger
of being shot down, erased from the sky.

I saw it on the news, she says, pointing a finger
toward me and then up to the night above.

She says the Chinese sent us the moon
but we were too stupid to say yes. Now

there is nothing aglow, the stars dissolved
by circus light, the moon shot with a clown’s

arrow. I agree, tell her it will be all right.
The moon will rise again, as it always does,

shining its bright eye. For a moment, I expect
her to laugh, find the humor in the moon,

the clown, the arrow, the Chinese sending the moon,
maybe by parcel post. But in her gaze, a horror

of the darkness, the hole around her thoughts,
the promise of an orbit broken. Now her mind

is a moon riddled with holes, falling through
the atmosphere, a slow dull flame on a shallow wick.