This month, an additional Moon Prize, the 114th, goes to Nina Heiser's intense poem "memories thick as mud."


memories thick as mud

                        by Nina Heiser


and then some
lips red as a licked red candy skin
pale as the morning moon
eyes dark as glittered sunshine she
was the altar of his doom she came
in the hours the world goes hiding
where secrets of the heart unfurl she
was his vision his hope his harbor
she was not his girl
her eyes glared like glaze ice
on black roads like a crow’s wing
in a colorless sky her eyes
found his still as frozen-over water
when you are dead she whispered
there will be nothing in that moment
she saw the fear in him the trepidation and she
walked away leaving him alone knowing
he watched as she grew small and smaller and
smaller until the world took her from him
and everything became shadow
after the black flies had their
turn at her she learned to squat
and to like the stretch of picking
in the early morning summer sun
not the white-hot sun she had always
known in the land where colors flowed
like silken robes inside the stench of
poverty and putrid waste where noises
throbbed in pandemonium where he
the photographer from a different world had
zeroed in without a flinch at the inner
harmonium of beauty’s spheres
she was a red-blooded woman in a
black-and-white world in an immobile
time not marked by clocks trapped inside
a crystal-blue cocoon under pricking stars shining and
brittle as an infinity of tiny glass shards sprinkling
down like sugar on ginger like snowflakes on ice like
the guilt of old secrets on newborn joy
shhh she said don’t speak don’t
break the bond silence has forged
between us don’t jinx the spell under
which we labor don’t call bad magic


* * * * *

Nina Heiser is a poet, writer and retired journalist currently living in central Florida and
Western New York. Her work has appeared in Tuck Magazine, Cadence, the Florida
State Poets Association Anthology, Vociferous Press anthology Screaming from the
Silence, Embark Literary Journal, and Gargoyle Magazine. Her poetry and photographs
have been featured in Pendemics Journal and Of Poets & Poetry.