When the belly of the porch light
has devoured the last of the unsuspecting
moths, its lantern frame swaying
in metronomic satiation, you ring.

I step out, that carnivorous chaperone looming,
to flowers and stumbling apologies and your welling
eyes reflecting the glow above, its allure
now your own. I am synapses away from acceptance
until I hear it—playing gently, like a grand piano 
in the next room, a party’s laughter muffled through 
the bathroom door, as mundane as a droning air conditioner
teetering in the window at summer’s end, unimposing
in the way intuition always is—the cadence
of our familiar conversation. It reveals:

There is no dark place I would not send a search party
to rescue flickers of luminescence from absorption, 
while you hide in the shadows, pouring out 
more of the shade. I have mistaken this music box
for a pedestal. It is you who turns the knob. And
though I am your dancer, frozen in arabesque, I have grown
nauseous from the dizzying spin of control. Watch me,
the strength with which I rip the handle from my abdomen
and toss it, testing my wingspan as it clatters before your feet.

The music stops.

For the first time, you see my porcelain eyes blink,
and the moths overhead, they begin to flutter.

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This poem emerged as an ekphrastic response to the dance final of Shahar Karny, a graduate student at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.

Watch her performance below.

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“LUMINESCENCE” was awarded Most Creative Ekphrastic Poem created during ARTS By The People’s 2024 Ekphrastic Writing Residency. It is published in the residency’s collection, Like Waves Through Flesh. Cash prize generously sponsored by the Santiago Abut Foundation.

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