This poem was published in The Avenue Journal, Issue X: Dogs
Supermoon
by Kathleen Kimball-Baker
Because he is so pale
I can see his shape even in the dark.
He rises from the warm straw
bedding of his house, shakes dust from his fur,
and sways, still drowsy.
The moon has kept us restless all night with her slow,
billowing burn. Now,
she lowers herself down the curve of the tundra sky,
hovers, radiant
and full, on a thin line of land.
Qimmiq glows blue.
He sits, facing west, tilts
back his head, and loosens a solo:
tender low notes
that lift and fall, that tumble and ache,
beseeching,
until the other sled dogs join—mournful and tremulous.
In time, their song trails off,
and the moon, as she falls, bequeaths the last of her light
to her favored one,
to Qimmiq, his new-moon eyes rimmed
in kohl, night gleam
becalmed in the lunar landscape of his thick coat.
Kathleen Kimball-Baker is a Minneapolis poet and dog-sledding enthusiast. Her poems are forthcoming or appear in Water~Stone, Nimrod International, Poet Lore, The Hopper, Muleskinner, Pangyrus, Magma, and elsewhere. She is a Pushcart nominee and compiling a hybrid chapbook about being a biracial Latina dogsledder obsessed with extreme cold and wilderness.
You can purchase The Avenue Journal Issue X: Dogs in paperback at Bookshop.org, or, if you prefer it in digital format, you can download the ebook in .epub format for pay-what-you-can (suggested donation $9) at ko-fi.