By Shantell Powell

Illustration Courtesy of NASA

Eclipse

My secret lover’s hands upon my body

in dark iglu womb.

Tundra fresh.

Cold nose on hot cheek,

soft nothing sighs

heat my insides.

I glow with qulliq heat.

I am the Sun.

Stoked too high,

my conflagrating wicks of arctic cotton

illuminate the unforgivable.

It’s brother Moon who wears

my dark smudge smear.

Lamp black upon his brow:

A soot inuksuk saying he was here.

The Moon is sullied.

His transgression brings

only the cold.

With my ulu I slice off the breast

he touched. I fling it

in his face. He can keep

my frigid flesh.

He will never have

my raging light.

Shantell Powell is a swamp hag and elder goth who was raised on the land and off the grid all over Canada. She’s a graduate of Simon Fraser University’s The Writers’ Studio, the LET(s) Lead Academy at Yale University, GrubStreet’s LGBTQ+ Novel Immersive, and is a 2026 McCormack Writing Center (formerly Tin House) scholar. She’s held residencies with Roots. Wounds. Words., IMPACT Festival, CAROUSEL Magazine, and Femme Folks Fest, and was the 2023 Yosef Wosk Fellow for the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. An Aurora finalist, her writing appears in Augur Magazine, The Deadlands, The Malahat Review, and dozens more anthologies and magazines. She’s been a barn mucker, belly dancer, comic shop manager, aerialist, industrial DJ, professional naked lady, and coffee slinger. When she grows up, she wants to be a space marine and storm chaser. When she isn’t writing, she wrangles chinchillas and gets filthy in the woods. She currently lives on the Haldimand Tract in so-called Kitchener, Ontario. To learn more about her writing, visit “Nudity is Only Skin-Deep” at http://shanmonster.dreamwidth.org, or find her on Mastodon https://c.im/@Shanmonster or BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/shanmonster.bsky.social