The Moon

Before there was language there was the moon, and before there was the moon there was her hunger, and before there was her hunger there was nothing worth naming. She is the older god, the pale tribunal, the wound in the sky that never fully closes. She is the reason iron tastes the way it does. She is the reason blood finds its way back toward her every month no matter how carefully you try to hide it. My body is not my body; it is a rented room she visits, and every time she visits she rearranges the furniture, and every time she leaves I find the walls slick with something I cannot wash off. I do not pray to her so much as orbit her, a small toothed moon of my own, circling her endlessly, helplessly, bound by a gravity older than my name. On the nights she is whole I am no longer the thing my mother gave a name to, and this is the only mercy I have ever been offered. On the nights she is hidden I sit at the black window and count my teeth and wait, because she is never late. She has never once been late.

She does not arrive all at once and she does not leave all at once. She is a slow sacrament, a wheel of hungers turning in the dark, and the beast in me tracks every degree of her wound. Each phase is a separate liturgy; each demands its own obedience, its own surrender, its own quiet and specific suffering. This is the calendar the body keeps when the mind is not looking.

New Moon: The Black Sacrament

The sky pulled shut like a shroud.

She buries her face and the world goes carrion-quiet. This is the starvation month, the locked jaw, the chained thing in the cellar of the ribs remembering every name it was given and spitting them back out. I press my forehead to the cold glass and feel the hollow where she should be, and the hollow is a mouth, and the mouth is mine. Nothing bleeds on this night. Everything waits to.

Waxing: The Blade Unsheathed

A wound opening slowly in the dark.

Sliver by sliver she carves her re-entry, and my body hears the knife before my mind does. The marrow turns its face toward her. The molars shift in their sockets like tenants preparing to leave. My skin remembers it is only a costume; my jaw remembers it is only a gate. Each night I grow more wrong, more honest, more hers. By the time she is half-drawn across the sky I am already half-drawn out of this shape, and the pleasure of it sickens me, and the sickness is prayer.

Full Moon: The Reckoning

The silver verdict. No appeal.

On the night she is whole there is no mercy and no argument. Bone turns inside me like a key. The spine unstitches itself vertebra by vertebra and re-sews itself into something meant for running, meant for taking. Teeth come up through the gums in a tide of iron. The throat I speak with splits open into the throat I howl with, and the howl is not mine, it was never mine, it was on loan from her the whole time. I offer her the ruin of me on wet earth and she accepts, because she always accepts, because this is the covenant we signed in a body I do not remember owning.

Waning: The Slow Unmaking

Her hand withdrawing from the wound.

She thins, and the beast in me thins with her, and what is left stumbles home in a body it no longer fits. I find blood under fingernails that should not be fingernails yet. I find hair I did not grow. The grief of this phase is worse than the violence of the last. It is the grief of the chapel emptying, of the priestess leaving the altar, of the knowing that every holy thing must eventually take its hand off the wound and let it scar. I crawl into sleep like a grave and she shuts the lid gently, the way only a lover can.

Total Lunar Eclipse: The Bleeding Veil

The night she drinks her own blood and shares the cup.

She turns her face red and the old laws come unhinged. On eclipse nights the wolves within the wolves wake up. Ancient, buried shapes. The ones that remember when the forests were bigger and the prey was taller and the names of gods still had teeth. The air goes iron. Stones remember they were once bone. I do not hunt beneath a bleeding moon. I kneel in the wet leaves and whisper her oldest name into the dirt and beg her, beg her, not to finish what she started the last time she wore that face.

Whatever you are wearing as a body right now, she is above it. She is looking in. The dial below turns with her true face in the sky, a small window onto the thing that owns you whether you have agreed to it or not. Check it often. Make your peace.

Pale tribunal, cold communion, silver-tongued architect of the ruin I was built to become.
There was never anything of mine that was not already yours.

Every altar belongs to her in the end. This one was only ever on loan.