Paige Passantino
Paige Ellen Passantino (she/hers) is an MFA candidate in poetry at Johns Hopkins University, where she teaches creative writing. She earned her BA in English Literature from Smith College as an Ada Comstock Scholar. Her work appears on Poets.org and in The Florida Review, SHŌ Journal, and is forthcoming in Folio, among others. She is a nominee for 2025 Best of the Net, was an honoree for the 2023 Adroit Prize, and her work has been supported by Tin House. She is currently working on her debut collection of poems, a memoir, and a novel about clowns.
Moonlit
I think this
is the life I wanted
all that time, the one that held itself
away from me while I kept choosing
lovely cups and creatures, circus-like
and therefore real
in all their shining. A man at the meeting
says at least today I’m not doing anything
that’s killing me – I think, apart from living –
yes, this is the life
I wanted,
suddenly livable and
sometimes lived.
Even when its shape is distant, this life feels closer
than the walk home from the shift
trying to not stop at the corner
to do anything other than turn
myself out for the rest of the evening –
walking to the end of the road
I make myself turn
in the direction
of the house
where I go inside
where I am not at the end
of a park’s shadow, looking up at a bruised moon in the sky
and down at a baggie appeared in my palm thinking
the two were the same.
Step One
Couldn’t see the moon
til the damn barn burned down.
Ooze of light beaming milky silver
over the bed’s leftover sheets –
like strips of a tattered slip,
or ribbons stitched to pointé shoes
spinning in soot. Ash clung to the walls,
seen best in the residual lack of darkness
after a fingertip strokes the hips of the rafters.
The bones clung to solidity. We took
a canister and burned them too, made sure
nothing was left behind, we wanted to shine
so bright, wanted some part of us,
after all, to wind up living.