The Meditative Moon

by Allyson Whipple

The moon had grown restless. After eons and eons of the same routine, she had come to resent her responsibility to Earth and its tides. She was tired of asteroids and comets brushing against her, marring her skin. She felt old, tired, and dried up.

            The sun advised her not to make any rash decisions, and advised her to take up zazen, to calm her restlessness and help her find contentment with her place in the universe.

            On her hundredth day of meditation, the moon had a realization, and the realization was that meditation wasn’t going to help her at all. The sun had just suggested it so as to keep her in line. She was sick and tired of having to reflect his light or sit and shiver in his shadow.

            It took all of her strength, but she broke free of her orbit and went soaring through space like the ship that had once landed on her back and pierced a flagpole through her brittle skin. As though she was anyone’s territory. As the moon picked up velocity, the flag flew off and got sucked into a black hole.

            Now it was her turn to crash into a few planets and shake things up.

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Allyson Whipple is an MFA student at the University of Texas at El Paso. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, most recently Come Into the World Like That (Five Oaks Press). Allyson teaches at Austin Community College.