Forget the Moon | Svetlana Litvinchuk
It’s been two years since we’ve danced
in the dark without a child between us.
Now that she dreams in her own bed,
we explore the strange land of our mattress,
the foreign landscapes of our changed bodies.
Our hands begin to remember the way.
Remember the secret language our hips
spoke to each other?
Even in the moonless dark, your whispers
found my ears. In the night’s sensory chamber
our hands see each other in a way our eyes
forget by daylight.
The braille of your spine beneath my fingertips.
The contours of your hands across my thighs.
We fill each other with breath, discover
the familiar in the strange landscapes
of deserted islands.
I urge my brain to abandon its thoughts,
pause this poem it insists on writing you,
forget the moon, all the wars outside
our door,
to let go so that I can hold you tighter,
as if to hold you is to hold the sky—
collapse the universe
between us.
Bonus audio of Svetlana reading her poem:
About the author:
Svetlana Litvinchuk is the author of Navigating the Hallways by Starlight (Fernwood Press, 2026). Her poetry has received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and the Best of the Net, and appears or is forthcoming in Pleiades, swamp pink, Redivider, About Place, Moon City Review, ANMLY, Iron Horse Literary Review, Lake Effect, and elsewhere. She is the Managing Editor of ONLY POEMS, Events Coordinator for Chill Subs, and a columnist for Sub Club. Originally from Ukraine, she now tends her garden in Missouri.