Near Edson Cemetery, South Lowell, Nighttime

Is it just me or is the moon getting thinner?
The more I walk on down Bowden toward the station
and the Quik-Mart, I mean. It’s just open till ten.
And so I walk a bit faster past dim houses
toward the little gas station so close to sleeping,
cradled in the little square formed where Gorham and
Edson cross each other near where I’m walking now
on a late-evening run for water, ’Gansett, and,
having missed dinner, crackers, maybe, something small,
probably all I’ll want this waning hour beneath
that yellow hangnail sticking thin out of the sky
down toward where Lowell flattens to take in all its dead
across the street from homes still holding so much life.

Matt Stefon is the author of the e-chapbook The Long Contraction: Twelve Rejected Poems (Smashwords, 2016) and the print chapbook Shaking the Wind (Finishing Line Press, 2017). He is poetry editor of West Texas Literary Review and lives and writes north of Boston.