I followed all the expert advice: at the moon’s perigee I rowed myself deep into the night and anchored even deeper in the Pacific’s heart. Beneath the earth’s umbra, I stopped believing in blood as a season of the moon, trained the iphone lens on the western blue and waited for moonset. I woke all but covered in worry and sea foam. Small black and white birds called out a nonsense verse in an island dialect. My boat listed, half-full of blooded water. I had been lulled into dreams of Illinois autumn where hunters and harvesters take the moon seriously as a version of gospel, where we stalk dinner through dark orange fields of corn wide as seascapes. I flailed for my phone, for oars and, finding nothing in my hands, filled them with red ocean and swam into the sky.
