Book Review: "Moon Facts", by Bob Schofield
Nostrovia! Poetry
$5 (USD)
Reviewed by Scherezade Siobhan
Dear Bob,
In an attempt to not kill myself, I browse through tumblr and the moon shows up on my screen as a NASA gif– a cross between a diamond studded muskmelon crafted by Damien Hirst and the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio. It pulsates like the soft spot on a newborn baby’s head. On days I am wracked with depression, I watch it long enough for it to shape-shift into a series of Nat Geo videos where its entire body is curling in and out of a lunar cycle mirroring the silver cocoon of a common red apollo’s chrysalis. I stare at it long enough before I realize how ordinary and breathtaking the celluloid of this nearly clichéd satellite.
When I am sad, the moon is everywhere and is trying to hug me with hands made of your poems.
I am sad today and the moon is your mixtape rushing through my dense veins in a tender pageantry, cooling the plenary ache with its saffron-milk balsam.
I look at the moon and I miss the terrace of my childhood home because I can’t return to it. Because it doesn’t exist anymore. I almost wrote trace instead of terrace. Because that is all I have left now. I miss the citrus pelt of summer draping our guava trees as my grandmother and I try to sleep under cheap mosquito nets and she teaches me to spot the dressmaker girl and her seven brothers arranged into the Big Dipper. She guides me to tuck the slim but sharp needles of my anxiety on this plump pincushion.
She was a skilled seamstress who believed in hope as a loose hemline. A thing open to alterations.
If you shake the snowglobe of this moon, you can still see the tottering silhouettes of an old woman and a young girl – looking to read / an entirely unfinished sky.
The moon is a flawed compass. Takes me homeward but forgets that any home I have known has always been a sketch in sand. Somewhere in its attic is a cabinet and inside it, the moon is a child’s / terrible drawing of an egg.
I palm this paper, dust the light-bulb, open the windows and there it goes – a knife with wings. It hides behind the deodars and pinches an owl’s cheek as if to say one day we’ll meet / at a giant costume contest.
But like my father, it never keeps its promises.
I too promise never to come here again. But it softens my limbs back into a shehnai of reeds. Its eyes slick with lunar jazz, it murmurs that the world is a disappearing / sequence of conch shells. It crushes its oyster blues beneath the sullen hammer of my knees. I tongue its pearl. It spills out of my throat in whale speech.
Did I tell you that the moon was the only imaginary friend I had as a child? Till I found out it was real. It was the year of men with fishbowl faces / the year of unswept chimneys. It was the reverse of finding out that dogs don’t smile and that grin is just a small puzzle of nervousness. The first time I tried to touch a dog (or maybe it was the moon?), I came back with fingers swollen like wild mushrooms. I remember you telling me that the moon is a book of bees (and sleepy?).
So we let sleeping moons lie.
I vow not to touch the moon again. I change cities. It follows me though. Everywhere I arrive, it maps my moods like a crowd of digital strangers / who love me for being / not entirely unlike them. It slowly becomes the lazy boyfriend I can never break up with because I am too scared to be alone.
Sometimes, drunkenly, he mumbles a sound so embarrassing / it makes the tide go out.
I try to leave again. I am tired of him staying only for the night. I cheat on him with a straw-haired boy who cradles me through the day, who likes to hum the song of my face in the middle of an afternoon, who bundles me under his vast shadow when I am too cold to notice the blueness of my lips. I try hard, Bob. But I fail. This fire-bellied boy gets close and I remember that it takes seconds to go from warmth to arson. His mouth turns into a rabid season. Everywhere it comes to rest on me, I am scalded right down to the eggshell weakness of my bones.
That is how I come back to my old body. Back to the broken jaw of my old window where a one eyed tree sits/ smoking a pipe.
I know he is still there. He smiles from behind the ghostfilm of smoke. His voice is thick with the ashes of age.
I don’t really know what is / safe to believe in these days.
Do you?
If so, by all means take me there.
And I do. And he does.
(All italicized and emboldened text is from Bob Schofield’s book, “Moon Facts”.)
Nostrovia! Poetry
$5 (USD)
Reviewed by Scherezade Siobhan
Dear Bob,
In an attempt to not kill myself, I browse through tumblr and the moon shows up on my screen as a NASA gif– a cross between a diamond studded muskmelon crafted by Damien Hirst and the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio. It pulsates like the soft spot on a newborn baby’s head. On days I am wracked with depression, I watch it long enough for it to shape-shift into a series of Nat Geo videos where its entire body is curling in and out of a lunar cycle mirroring the silver cocoon of a common red apollo’s chrysalis. I stare at it long enough before I realize how ordinary and breathtaking the celluloid of this nearly clichéd satellite.
When I am sad, the moon is everywhere and is trying to hug me with hands made of your poems.
I am sad today and the moon is your mixtape rushing through my dense veins in a tender pageantry, cooling the plenary ache with its saffron-milk balsam.
I look at the moon and I miss the terrace of my childhood home because I can’t return to it. Because it doesn’t exist anymore. I almost wrote trace instead of terrace. Because that is all I have left now. I miss the citrus pelt of summer draping our guava trees as my grandmother and I try to sleep under cheap mosquito nets and she teaches me to spot the dressmaker girl and her seven brothers arranged into the Big Dipper. She guides me to tuck the slim but sharp needles of my anxiety on this plump pincushion.
She was a skilled seamstress who believed in hope as a loose hemline. A thing open to alterations.
If you shake the snowglobe of this moon, you can still see the tottering silhouettes of an old woman and a young girl – looking to read / an entirely unfinished sky.
The moon is a flawed compass. Takes me homeward but forgets that any home I have known has always been a sketch in sand. Somewhere in its attic is a cabinet and inside it, the moon is a child’s / terrible drawing of an egg.
I palm this paper, dust the light-bulb, open the windows and there it goes – a knife with wings. It hides behind the deodars and pinches an owl’s cheek as if to say one day we’ll meet / at a giant costume contest.
But like my father, it never keeps its promises.
I too promise never to come here again. But it softens my limbs back into a shehnai of reeds. Its eyes slick with lunar jazz, it murmurs that the world is a disappearing / sequence of conch shells. It crushes its oyster blues beneath the sullen hammer of my knees. I tongue its pearl. It spills out of my throat in whale speech.
Did I tell you that the moon was the only imaginary friend I had as a child? Till I found out it was real. It was the year of men with fishbowl faces / the year of unswept chimneys. It was the reverse of finding out that dogs don’t smile and that grin is just a small puzzle of nervousness. The first time I tried to touch a dog (or maybe it was the moon?), I came back with fingers swollen like wild mushrooms. I remember you telling me that the moon is a book of bees (and sleepy?).
So we let sleeping moons lie.
I vow not to touch the moon again. I change cities. It follows me though. Everywhere I arrive, it maps my moods like a crowd of digital strangers / who love me for being / not entirely unlike them. It slowly becomes the lazy boyfriend I can never break up with because I am too scared to be alone.
Sometimes, drunkenly, he mumbles a sound so embarrassing / it makes the tide go out.
I try to leave again. I am tired of him staying only for the night. I cheat on him with a straw-haired boy who cradles me through the day, who likes to hum the song of my face in the middle of an afternoon, who bundles me under his vast shadow when I am too cold to notice the blueness of my lips. I try hard, Bob. But I fail. This fire-bellied boy gets close and I remember that it takes seconds to go from warmth to arson. His mouth turns into a rabid season. Everywhere it comes to rest on me, I am scalded right down to the eggshell weakness of my bones.
That is how I come back to my old body. Back to the broken jaw of my old window where a one eyed tree sits/ smoking a pipe.
I know he is still there. He smiles from behind the ghostfilm of smoke. His voice is thick with the ashes of age.
I don’t really know what is / safe to believe in these days.
Do you?
If so, by all means take me there.
And I do. And he does.
(All italicized and emboldened text is from Bob Schofield’s book, “Moon Facts”.)
About the Reviewer:
Scherezade Siobhan is a psychologist, writer and the maker of world's finest Spanish omelettes. Her work has been published/is forthcoming in tNY.Press, Queenmobs, Bluestem Magazine, Black & BLUE Writing, Cordite Poetry Review, The Nervous Breakdown, Electric Cereal, Mandala, Fruita Pulp, TMO Magazine & others. Her first poetry collection Bone Tongue was published by Thought Catalog Books in 2015. She can be found squeeing about small furry animals & neuroscience at viperslang or @zaharaesque.
Scherezade Siobhan is a psychologist, writer and the maker of world's finest Spanish omelettes. Her work has been published/is forthcoming in tNY.Press, Queenmobs, Bluestem Magazine, Black & BLUE Writing, Cordite Poetry Review, The Nervous Breakdown, Electric Cereal, Mandala, Fruita Pulp, TMO Magazine & others. Her first poetry collection Bone Tongue was published by Thought Catalog Books in 2015. She can be found squeeing about small furry animals & neuroscience at viperslang or @zaharaesque.