Her body, thin, curved, like the caged crescent moon she feeds. She turns the handle, round and round, grinding golden fallen stars, sucked into the pipe of the pointed hut’s roof.

:::

Night after night, she feeds diamond stardust from a silver spoon to the luminescent, but insatiable, man in the moon.

It is in this way that she, the forever unseen woman in the moon, finds herself caged.

*Publisher’s Note:

Remedios Varo’s oil-on-masonite painting Celestial Pablum (1958) is described by Daniel Zamani, Curator of Museum Barbarini, in this two-minute video at YouTube, Surrealism & Magic: Enchanted Modernity (September 2022):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKaKpiX1pLc

(Link was retrieved on 8 January 2023.)

Lisa Molina

is the author of the digital chapbook Don’t Fall in Love with Sisyphus (Fahmidan Publishing & Co, 2022). Her chapbook Womb Worlds is now available from Finishing Line Press. Her poetry, creative nonfiction, and flash fiction can be found in numerous online and print publications and anthologies, including Beyond Words Magazine, Miniskirt Magazine (on 11/15/22), Trouvaille Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Neologism Poetry Journal, Fahmidan Journal, Sky Island Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine, Amethyst Review, Boats Against the Current Poetry Magazine, Peeking Cat, Bright Flash Literary Review, Epoch Press Autumn 2021 “Transitions” issue, and several anthologies by Quillkeepers Press and The Poet.

Molina’s poem “Who You See” was nominated by Fahmidan Journal for Best of the Net Anthology 2022, and her poetry has twice been chosen as a winner in the Beyond Words Magazine 250-Word Writing Challenge. Her flash fiction “Shadow Children” won First Prize for Fiction in The Ekphrastic Review’s Art of Tarot Contest (December 2022), and her flash fiction “Young Man in the Moon” was named a Finalist in The Ekphrastic Review’s Fifty Shades of Blue Contest (February 2022).

She lives in Austin, Texas with her husband, two adult children, and two cats, and works with high school students with special needs.

Author’s website: https://lisalitgeek.wordpress.com