Member Poem

The night I learned grandfather had bipolar disorder
The pale gold half-disk of the moon gleamed

Like the broken face of a pocket watch,
cracked against the burning blue sky.

The black leaves framed its
sickening shining exposition.

Its cratered surface transfixed me, the terminator
Divided bright from dark, tarnished the sky with dead mechanisms.

(Because I live only with the defects uncoiling
from my kinked-spring, broken-clock inheritance, I cannot.)

Carrying this imperfect light, I try
to extinguish. This nonexistence is all the control I have.

Now, alighting on a specimen like a discarded scrap,
I stand silent. This luna moth pinned beneath glass

eyespots black on sterile white. That night, through my tears,
my mother told me not to remember the scientist half differently

Across unspoken institutionalized stays,
yet that irreparable timepiece bequeathed to me
cuts crescents in my clenched fist.