Cavern: The Moon's Dark Side
Citrine
Deconstruction. Diversion. Do not enter. Road signs rise from along a cornered cul-de-sac, indenting the fragile dirt. Tombstones lie facedown, punctures in their granite sides. Gates are sealed. Grass turns brown. The gravel is your metronome. Your foot: the pendulum. This was Tanglewood Court. This was Ludgate Circle. These were the dead ends of happiness, trailmarkers until the excavators arrived. Don’t turn back, lest the sinkholes close up. On to the next town, where they might not find us. On to the next town, where I never met you and it never hurt. Onto the next town.
Opal
Fall used to be a wizard that filled schedules with withering orchards. Now it brings flat taxes and university start-ups and degrees that seldom go anywhere and it sucks. The doughnuts remain good as always but all else suffers. I prefer to call the season autumn with every fiber of my being. I prefer to call my platonic interactions love because they are glorious. If my molecules could speak to me, they would berate my obsession with C-sharp minor, with the progression of time. They’d be unflattering and honest to a seismic fault, but they’d be mine.
Sapphire
In Universe #56, you forgave me. The other 99 aren’t as pleasant, but let’s not dwell on the present. The beach was warm. I sat in the shadow of an oil palm, wondering how and why the Edwardian goth hadn’t responded to my texts. You said, Don’t worry about it and led me astray into paradise again. There was a dog who had bitten off three of his legs and was still caught in the trap. We freed him. There was a Salvation Army that curiously stayed in business through the winter. We terrorized its aisles. There was a makeshift theater and we played pretend with the Spanish moss, making false beards from it. We were majestic. In Universe #57, you waited for the credits to roll, then shot the usher dead before storming out of the theater.
Jade
We stayed on the island because you closed off the ocean. Again. Our conversation was a meadowsweet cluster, breathlessly elaborate. The sky was further azure than it had been since the Mesozoic. We collected memories like cecropia moths and the Mason jars matched accordingly. You were a ballroom and I was a wallflower and we just kind of fit. But boredom is the bane of photosynthesis, the scourge of life in somber nothingness. You’re whispering, Those aren’t blueberries right before the poison sets in. You’re bored of this. Brush me off like dandruff. Hold me tight or not at all. Please leave a message, and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Don’t leave me unread. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave. Don’t.
Diamond
I hoped to write a masterpiece, carved in marble and dated in Roman. I hoped that when I got to your porch, the door wouldn’t be bolted shut. I hoped that I’d have enough ink in my typewriter to make the final judgment. I hoped to no longer be a vampire staking my own heart, holding onto some lost version of you like a skeleton. I hoped to walk the fine line between catacombs and mausoleums, a ghost at last. I kept hoping and you said: Get it over with already. I’m writing the conclusion. I absorbed your ravings and went through the wringer with our beach towels. I sent you thousands of letters and you sent only one back that didn’t answer any of my questions but asked a different one instead.
Jasper
Because that’s just the way you were manufactured, by a cynical god of suburbia with infinite time on his hands. Stoneware clay, never terracotta. I adore your wretchedness. I cling to the sweat of your sentences, your words that overheat in baseless exchanges. You plant a pine tree that turns ochre by mid-October. You claim you saw it coming. You claim to see everything coming. There’s an evergreen disheveled on the sidewalk. There’s crickets for your encore, darling, so sink your claws in me. Fight hungrily. It’s like rust but I’ll explain it like it’s iron. It’s like copper but my patina is a bit more bruised and blackened. I’m crying on the surface of the statue I’m completed in.
Obsidian
Deep inside, I know. I know that if I healed you for centuries, the same wound would open once the millennium began. I’d sit defeated in a Colosseum I sculpted for your entertainment. This isn’t what love is. Love shouldn’t be emptying a shell of yourself over and over again, an insane bucket in a leaking asylum. I had a dream that you bent the truth until it snapped. I had a vision where you stabbed an innocent bird to death in a silhouetted forest. I watched as a bystander. I kissed you afterward, drinking the ichor in your mouth. I woke up cold. Frightened. Debased. Reveling in the taste. Sleep left me to fend in your starving wilderness. You hated it.
Tourmaline
There is a freight train rushing at 200 mph, yet you refuse to step off the tracks/on the breaks. I’m yelling in your ubiquitous direction. You fucking insomniac, pervading reality. You wreck this realm’s mentality. You parasite, gripping my neck. You stunningly beautiful mess. Respond. Mayday. Mayday. Respond. Just step out of our rented apartment and torch grass and drive to the bar and grab a gin + tonic and sing with the buskers and act as a husk of yourself and march away when the twilight rain comes calling. I’m back in the orchard and you’re about to pick the apple. We collide. The cherries are tart. The almonds are roasting in firelight. I am limited. You are endless. We are fine.
Beeper Peddle is a writer and healer living on the East Coast. She lives with her partner and their beloved soul puppy. Beeper writes about sorrows, lies, and deep loves. When you read her work, you will dip down into her heart and end up in all manner of body parts. Should you find yourself reflected in these words, it is merely coincidence; however, it does not surprise her you share the same heart. Find her at bethpeddle.com and @beeperpeddle on Twitter and Instagram
Georgia Howe (she/her) is a lover of surreal poetry, strange etymologies, petrichor, and serendipity. She published her debut poetic memoir A Million Catalysts in 2023, shortly after graduating from high school. She will be attending the University of Iowa in August.
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