A Poem by M.J. Iuppa

Night of the Full Moon

What is calm in unmown grass?
Is it the lack of winter that swirls
swatches of tourmaline, cresting
like waves?
Moonlight everywhere--rust-scented
shadows dragging their weight across
the yard without a groan--nothing
disturbs the sleep of ducks.

Nothing vanishes in silence between steps,
between heartbeats . . . The break in the air's
slight movement is a gesture to settle down . . .
and something does resolve in moonlight's

lack of hurry--an hour erasing the shadow
that stops me without consequence of
weather--a door left half-closed
behind me.

M.J. Iuppa lives on Red Rooster Farm near the shores of Lake Ontario.  Most recent poems, lyric essays and fictions have appeared in the following journals:  Poppy Road Review, Black Poppy Review, Digging to the Roots, 2015 Calendar, Ealain, Poetry Pacific Review, Grey Sparrow Press:  Snow Jewel Anthology, 100 Word Story, Avocet, Eunoia Review, Festival Writer, Silver Birch Press:  Where I Live Anthology, Turtle Island Quarterly, Wild Quarterly, Boyne Berries Magazine (Ireland), The Lake, (U.K.), Punchnel's, Camrock Review, Tar River Poetry, Corvus Review, Clementine Poetry, Postcard Poetry & Prose, and Brief Encounters:  A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction, editor by Judith Kitchen and Dinah Lenney (Norton), among others.  She is the Director of the Visual and Performing Arts Minor Program at St. John Fisher College.