Waning Moon
Linda-Raven Woods is a 2019 Hackney Literary Award winner, a 2021 winner of the Andrew Glaze Poetry Prize, and recently placed as a semi-finalist in the Big Moose Prize Novel competition. She is an enrolled member of the Echota Cherokee tribe of Alabama and teaches at Alabama A&M University.
By Linda-Raven Woods
We were born in the time of some waning moon, I think,
when things all around were closing in, cinching tighter,
choking us about our own necks
& in this time we ceased to breathe,
our pulse weak, because we had no heartbeat
once the drum had stopped.