Read A Love Letter from a Stray Moon for Free Online

becomes inconsolable every month. So inconsolable that I drench the earth, for if I must weep with loss I will not bleed alone—I will tip the oceans sideways so they share my kinetic, mad, electric blood. La Llorona , the woman weeping by the river, looks to me and, when I cry, the rivers burst their banks. I have no soil for seed, not a drop of water and I know no harvest. Though I bring all things to their fullest potential, in me there is no quickening life, no possibilities. I applaud my sister but I am anguished for more than my narrow slice of sky.
    I would have chosen to be Cuaxolotl, goddess of the hearth, but I was made Coyolxauhqui, goddess of the moon. As such, I am always exiled, on the brink of mind and light. Does it matter how I yearn for the hearth or for green day and fullness, round belly and fruitness? He came to love my lips for the language they write across the sky in the mind’s light—I have lips, yes, but no smooth pelvis to hold the thunder of birth. It is already cracked. I have the hips of a boy, and I am vividly barren, my eternal, strange unfuckedness.
    I painted my barrenness and the fertility of the earth. ‘Children are the days, and this is where I end,’ I wrote, but it wasn’t true, and anyway children adored me: I treated them as equals and they in turn—with greater generosity—treated me as an equal of theirs. I masked my longing with pets: dogs and cats, monkeys, doves and parrots, an eagle and a deer.
    Cosmic and telluric, external and internal, I painted my own myth, that I must give birth to myself. If I can’t physically be a mother then I must begin my motherhood in the most metaphysical way possible. I painted like no one else and, as a painter, I gave birth to myself. My paintings, he said, were ‘acid and tender, hard as steel and delicate and fine as a butterfly’s wing, loveable as a beautiful smile, and profound and cruel as the bitterness of life.’
    I painted the desert of my days, for I was deserted and lonely, limping through my life. Limping? Did I say limping? Not limping but striding firmly from crisis to crisis. And when my pain made him sad and guilty I’d draw mischievous pornographic sketches which made him snort with laughter, bullfrog honking in the pond.
    The left side of my body is painted darkly now, with the moon in tears by my head. Once, I painted myself holding my palette in the form of my heart, painting my vulnerability with my heart’s blood. Now it is different. I paint myself, holding my palette as if it were a shield. My art alone is my protection, shielding me from the pain of loss.

If You are Too Easily,
Dangerously,
Enchantable

I created a bed, a four-poster bed with skeletons on top, surrounded by shells and under the canopy I put a glass-covered box full of butterflies. Whitman, his beard full of butterflies, said Lorca, whose mind was full of moonlight.
    Diego created a garden, more beautiful than any I’d seen, and created a home into which everyone could come. My Diego. He was never mine: he belonged to himself, and he was too generous, too universal in his love to belong to me or anyone and, in that generosity, the trap was set. A wall of organ cactus grew between us, and the fountains in the courtyard played instead of us.
    In the beginning was the word, right? Wrong. In the beginning, I was. I sang one pure white note into the black silence. It was I who let there be mindlight—other light more magical than the sun’s, in those lovely days when the world was young. Young it continued to be for aeons: young it could have been forever. In those lovely days, he used to come to all my parties, he drank too much, he fucked, he jumped burning embers, he played, he stayed up all night and I beamed with pleasure, for then he was truly enlightened: delight lit him, he shone in my light. Now he shuts the curtains, walls me out, he will have no tryst with me. He did not leave me