The Hunter’s Moon reaches
bloody illumination tonight
obliviously obscuring
what would be my first
glimpse of the Draconids.
I’ve yet to witness
a meteor shower which is
to say my blood still burns
from when I saw a star fall
by chance years ago
and didn’t make a wish—
how dare the moon rise
outshining Draconic glows
with no light of its own,
being muse to other poets
but preventing my words
about fast-flying wonders
in Draco to take full flight,
sending them back
into my hands, wings duller
in pearlescence: this moon
insists I wax poetic about it
being a perfect crimson pearl
but I stand steadfast
with equal desire to capture
my Draconids,
an incessantly patient hunter
against the moon.
David Ly is the author of Mythical Man (2020) and Dream of Me as Water (2022), both published under the Anstruther Books imprint of Palimpsest Press, and short-listed for the 2021 and 2023 ReLit Poetry Awards, respectively. He is also co-editor (with Daniel Zomparelli) of Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022). David’s poems have appeared in publications such as Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry, PRISM International, and The Ex-Puritan, where he won the inaugural Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence. David is the Poetry Editor at This Magazine.
