He Promised Me the Moon

Marge Simon

He Promised Me the Moon

I came here hoping
this world would suffice,
but all I met were flimsy ghosts
playing with fractals and logistics,
as meaningless as gossip –until him.

He hired me as his model,
even promised me the moon
before his wife’s death.
I wasn’t planning on this,
to know such human feelings.

He begged me to move in, after.
But he sits now, staring at his paintings.
He doesn’t even want to be touched.
Her flowers shrivel in their pots,
for want of her special love.

She was from Orlando,
a crowded, touristy place
of slender women, cocktails
at four, fashion-wise and empty-
headed as the rest of their lot.

But I don’t leave him. I can’t.
It makes me wince, knowing
I can assume a liquid form,
a creature foreign to this world,
from a planet of endless storms.

Perhaps tomorrow he’ll be aware,
pick up his palette, have me pose.
I don’t care how painful or how long,
I only want him to undress me,
kiss me in familiar places—

I’ll find us a moon of our own,
far from Earth.

__________

Marge Simon’s works appear in publications such as DailySF Magazine, Pedestal, Urban Fantasist. She edits a column for the HWA Newsletter, “Blood & Spades: Poets of the Dark Side,” and serves as Chair of the Board of Trustees. She won the Strange Horizons Readers Choice Award, 2010, and the SFPA’s Dwarf Stars Award, 2012. She has won three Bram Stoker Awards ® for Superior Work in Poetry and has poetry in HWA’s Simon & Schuster collection, It’s Scary Out There, tbp 2015. Marge also has poems in Darke Phantastique, Qualia Nous collections, Chiral Mad 3 and Spectral Realms, 2014-2015.