The Day I Superglued the Moon

So, one day, my father gave me the Moon.

It cracked and broke.

It fell from a bookshelf with too many books,

Or perhaps I was careless with it, or clumsy like I get when I’m about to have my period,

Or a wind knocked it down,

Or it was tired of being stuck in orbit without any friends closer than Brooklyn.

Anyway, it broke into two terrible pieces,

And I cried

Because it was the Moon, and my father gave it to me, and I broke it.

And one feels great guilt in the destruction of celestial bodies—

Even if you are only one small body stuck in a relentless system of waste, still it is all your fault, all the time, and life isn’t long enough to first learn this and then make all the necessary reparations.

Well, to continue my story, I broke the Moon and cried, and my husband Carlos cannot stand to see me cry.

Filled with the carnival glee of desperation, he turned cartwheels, wore a red nose and rainbow wig, did handstands, conjured silk handkerchiefs from his sleeve, showered me in flowers and confetti, threatened to eat his own nads, whatever he had to do to keep me from weeping.

But I was inconsolable; I had broken the Moon.

Nothing would ever be right, and, you see, my father, my father had given it to me.

So Carlos, who is clever and loving, went online—

And with the frictionless ease of technology, with a pulse of electricity, with kindness and fossil fuels, and corporate machinery, with all the history of knackerhouses and patents and plastic packaging, and workers strikes and rare materials mined from the earth, and strange planetary systems behind him,

He bought me some gorilla glue

So I could fix my Moon.

So I could plug it into my computer, and charge it up

And watch it glow, and think of my father

On all those nights in this brick-lined city

When I cannot see the Moon.