Moon Water
When I tell my father about moon water, I expect him
to say something about nonsense, witchery.
I try to make it sound benign: you fill a clear jar with water
and let it sit under the full moon. The next day, you drink it.
He smiles. We add cardamom, wild mint, cinnamon.
Outside, the moon is barely visible. Somewhere beneath the clouds
is the Buck Moon. July is such a masculine month.
When I describe my father to friends, I often say, alpha.
I wonder if we have ever experienced
a full moon together aside from this one.
I wonder who I would be if I had a father who praised it,
who took me into the wild and told me it was feminine,
who explained that the trees are ancestors.
The next day we clink our anointed jars together.
The moon has given us something and I know
that maybe I am the only one of the two of us
who recognizes this, who seeks to name it.
I do not know what exists inside him, but for a moment
we are identical, made of silver.
My father brings his glass back to mine—
delicious he says and we drink again.
Summer
broke through
the skin of its own season.
There was nectar, of course,
and the smell of mud.
The Man and the Woman stood in the garden
while the bees flew, engorged.
The beginning shouldn’t begin in summer.
It’s too heavy.
I am home in the Midwest and I tell old friends
that summer is no longer my favorite season. I tell
anyone I can, as if saying that I am all fall, people
will understand me.
Summer asks too much of me.
As a child, my best friend and I named
the first lightning bug of the season.
This was when we counted the days, when we wanted
our skin chlorine-taut, wanted pink cheekbones,
when we’d name the firefly something like
Swimming Pool, Light, Midnight, Joy,
when everything, including me,
longed to be limp with light
fruit-sick and nearly trembling
through the heat.
Brooke Sahni is the author of Before I Had the Word (Texas Review Press, 2021), which won the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, selected by Maggie Smith. She is also the author of Divining (Orison Books, 2020), which won the Orison Chapbook Prize. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in journals such as, Denver Quarterly, 32 Poems, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Boulevard, Indiana Review, Sixth Finch, Cimarron Review and elsewhere. Her third collection, In This Distance, is forthcoming in 2025.