Today's poem is by George Looney

After the Carnival Closes Down
       

Gravity, at times, goes slack, like the night
the Ferris wheel lifted a woman to the moon.
Believe you could go back and find the carnival
with its canned, pitiful version of exotic music
and let the Ferris wheel lift you into a future
you imagined with your back flat on the earth
night after night. The absence the Ferris wheel

stands in for, with its gaudy lights visible for miles,
is enough to scare you on to rides more linear
and closer to the ground, where gravity is
less of a concern. Despite bulbs where suckers
would be, the black tentacles of the Octopus,
spinning and looping and dipping, stay close enough
to the horizon you can breathe without gasping.

Sorrow, though, makes of the heart a carnie game,
rigged, where the prizes collapse into dust
on the haphazard shelves, winning not an option.
What happened to the woman who touched the moon
isn't a story gravity's concerned with,
and laughter has a history of absence and recurrence.
The moon prefers being low to the horizon,
close enough you could tie a string to it and take it home.

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Copyright © 2023 George Looney All rights reserved
from The Acrobatic Company of the Invisible
Cider Press Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission