I was lost as the moon

on the night it disappeared

into umbra charcoal cold

waiting for the earth to turn

paint bloody swaths of illumination

excavate bones

a wait so long I forgot my name

the way it fluttered

from my mother’s mouth

a sparrow startled to wing

into a cracked-open sky

lost years decades

one night the moon slips shadow

harvests my name

from the constellations

pulls me over land

humped shouldered

seas stirred black

time metered and shelved

to leave me with the morning tide

on this sun-bleached shore.

~Heidi Seaborn

This poem tells my story of living a peripatetic life and then finding home back where I grew up, finding love and finding my way back to writing. It also is a play on the name Sea Born and threaded with illusions to Venus. I loved that West Trade Review chose to publish it in this issue with this cover.