Andrew Christoforakis
Your grandpa wants to tell you how he fought the moon. You assume he lost but it takes him a while to get there with all those digressions on your grandma’s beauty, the feats of strength and banjo contests. Professional puppy dog tail snippers, he promises, are real and in some places a booming business. You believe nothing but this: the woman in a full niqab on the treadmill next to you at the gym has more to say about suffering than every community theater dropout. Every night Romeo and Juliet die in their arms alone and you want to tell your grandpa you prefer Mercutio, but now he’s talking phases of the moon, how the Latin word luna gives us both lunacy and lunatic, those fools whose sense was taken with the tides. Poor stationary sharks. Poor awoken sleepwalkers. There is a rhythm that must be respected, a venerable unspooling of facts. Listen, he implores you: I traded a golf club for this dog.
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Andrew Christoforakis (he/him) is a poet based out of Naperville, Illinois. He has had work published in Blood Tree Literature, West Trade Review, Radar Poetry, B O D Y, and others. His chapbook But What If No One’s Looking Out for Us? won first prize in the Beyond Words Magazine Fourth Annual Chapbook Awards.