‘Turtle Shell Madness Waiting for the Moon’ by Max Klement

Twilight strike quickly the ever-thinning day.

After the silver-spark hour of clatter-knife and china-plate, past the golden parade: shiny black leather shoes slipping new on the snapping-hard wax-buff dance floor; to the time of black: velvet soot black; iris black; piano-back spade-black.

Strike the hours on never-seen bells, singing the night in solid metal tones: alone—alone—alone. Empty streets never at peace, the echo of lonely thoughts and fears pitch scratch-pen ocean waves.

After the clatter-china silver-knife sparkle-plate, past the parade of gold—hard wax shiny clicking shoes—to the rhythm of black: eight-ball black, coal black, rain-wet street black. Beetle wing snapback, a melancholy courtyard to cross: your eyes were like fields of half-burnt wheat; hair like brilliant fire in the sky.

Stacks, shelves, walls of books—volumes of silence, voices extinguished. A tall phantom wind arcs from the south, carrying with it the voices of the nevermore, gone, whose words clack stone jaws in my head: trees hush and shake. Griffin cacophone hand-bone without rest, dancing to the soulless song of this night. Not even the sultry cries of the night birds spinning above—black-flight brittle-night—pass my window squares. Call to the night; call to the dark: the chatter voices in the gloom of solitude, of alone.

Clock-chime last time, evermore, only a room to listen: whip-wind voices carry the tune. The chime becomes a howl, the voice, a thousand miles from the soft-turn black-burn soil. Turn my heart away from the setting yellow past. You cry within me. I turn again, the lead-black lead-back night crushing me from end-to-end: turtle shell madness waiting for a moon.

Like a thing well done, back-hand craft-hand, this night is yours alone. Stepping into dark, yours alone, you know there is no peace at the ocean bottom: bodies tumble and sway, mimic seaweed, mimic life; the silence of the dark upon you. Talk to the past: your voice becomes the night filled with a thousand stars and a constant tide of black.

Through my frozen pane the moon slices a crescent swatch, torn from here to here: the sky shivers at the moon’s passing. I wait for a single star—pulsing speck of hope—weaving a blazing tapestry of light on light. The stars curl by, in passionate clusters and spirals, spinning in a sky of unaware marine brilliance.

The night is empty now. The last spider-thin golden-web leaves of autumn are fallen; a branch taps lightly at my window, message from the past—I wait for it to repeat, to clarify the lying rain. Where you sleep, the stars are far tonight, watching the rain sweep: across—across.

Call out the night! Call out the dark, the chatter voices in the gloom of solitude, of alone. Talk to the past: you came to me with words of love.

Tonight, we’re stripping off the bark.

Max Klement, a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, is a writer and healthcare worker living in the Chicago area.