A Brief Word About the Moon by Kurt Luchs

​She’s moving away from us
a few inches every year,
the longest breakup in history,
and perhaps by the time
she’s free of our gravity
we won’t even be here
to mark the occasion, moving
on ourselves through stranger pastures
beyond this brief and precious
thing called life to lands
unknown and unknowable, the final
mystery after love has left
and what will it matter
then without her quicksilver face
to shine down upon us?


Kurt Luchs (kurtluchs.com) won a 2022 Pushcart Prize, the 2021 Eyelands Book Award, the 2021 James Tate Poetry Prize and the 2019 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. He has written humor for the New Yorker, the Onion and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. His humor collection, It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’s Really Funny)(2017), and his poetry collection, Falling in the Direction of Up (2021), are published by Sagging Meniscus Press. His poetry chapbook, The Sound of One Hand Slapping, was issued in 2022 by SurVision Books. He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.