Moonlight Theology

 

Moonlight Theology

The moon looks like a busted headlight
hanging crooked in the sky's cracked windshield,
and I'm down here collecting the pieces
of every version of myself I left scattered
across gas station parking lots and 3 a.m. kitchen floors.

Someone told me once that light takes years
to reach us from dead stars—that we're always
looking at ghosts, always loving things
that stopped burning before we were born.
Maybe that's why I keep circling back

to the same broken prayers, the same
silver-tongued lies I whisper to my reflection:
you're fine, you're whole, you're not just
a collection of beautiful wreckage
held together by caffeine and spite.

The moon doesn't care that it's damaged.
It still pulls the tide, still makes wolves
throw their heads back and howl
at something they can't name but recognize
in their bones—that ache, that ancient magnetism.

I want to be like that. Want to be so unapologetically
cracked that my light leaks out sideways,
illuminates all the wrong things, the ugly things,
the things we're supposed to keep dark.
Want to glow like a wound that refuses to close,

like a headlight that got smashed but still works,
still cuts through fog and leads something home—
even if home is just this: me, standing in my own wreckage,
calling it beautiful because what else can you call
the way broken things still manage to shine?

-Artwork created in Photoshop and additional image-painting programs
-Poetry written by me
-both copyright to ©Stacy Stephens