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December Moon

The days are short
and the dead accumulate

like mildew-stained fairytales
I collected from used book sales,

alphabetized by author,
in my lilac bedroom,

the room where I found
a Sesame Street poster

behind one of the bookshelves
I moved to frame the window,

surprised I was once a little girl,
not a teen who avoided

the trash can that hid his gin,
the times of day he brooded,

the floorboards that creaked
by the family room

where he sat in his Lazy Boy—
Sit down and talk to me.

Sitting was death in that house
I learned to move through.

The days are shorter now
and the dead are characters.

How it won’t be long before
I puppet my mother through

that suburban gingerbread house
under white nonpareil moon,

add her silence to my father’s
British deadpan, his restless pilot wings.

The days are short
and I search for those fairytales—

all of them—
in my mother’s basement boxes.

—
Caroline N. Simpson’s chapbook, Choose Your Own Adventures and Other Poems, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2018. In 2020, Delaware Division of Arts awarded Caroline an Established Artist Fellowship in Poetry, and she has been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize in both poetry and nonfiction. She teaches high school English at the Wilmington Friends School in Wilmington, DE.

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