The Prompts Today are Washing Dishes (which I am choosing to interpret as general quotidian household living) and There was a _______ Who ______. I needed to get away from the brooding abstractions of yesterday and into something decidedly surreal, which is where I am usually most comfortable. I come home to magical realism when I lose my writer’s voice. I feel like I am catching my stride again.

There Was a Woman Who Swallowed the Moon
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

There once was a woman who swallowed the moon.
I will not tell you that I know her.
I will not tell you that this is a lie.

I knew a woman who swallowed the moon,
felt the ice and the fire of it slide down her spine.
(No, not her throat.)
How it slid down her spine.
How it sizzled. How it burned.

I once knew a woman who swallowed a lie.
Felt it explode in her belly like stars.
Felt how her own light dimmed
and almost went out.
Girl, was she ever a mess!

I know a woman who lives in a house,
and this is how she exists in that house:
She sews things together.
She makes knots in strings.
She throws words in the air
to see which ones fall together.
She wanders down labyrinth hallways
weaving her fingerprints into all that she passes.
She steals words. This woman is a thief of words.
Just listen:

There once was a woman who wept a river.
I will not say if the river is tears.
I will not tell you about the mud,
and the stones, and the sycamore.
But this I can say:
when the weeping was done,
the river flowed through her house.
The words bobbed in the flow,
and the lie was extinguished,
and the moon was a boat she climbed into.

There once was a woman who sailed on the moon.
This is how she wailed.
This is how she moaned.
This is how she danced.
This is how she trailed a net behind her
to rescue the words she had lost.