A month since I returned from the moon –
you might have got my postcard.
If you could decipher English in
my ciotóg smudge, you’ll know
it was down a sidestreet past a Bäckerei,
where wind-snapped white washing
hung anyshape from the balconies.
I mistook some lingerie for squirrels,
a willowy shadow-struggle above lawns
across Reinickendorf. I might’ve added
my moon wasn’t pocked by craters,
baked volcanoes, vaporized lakes.
Roads were paved plumb with cycle lanes
from Shawarma to Schultheiss.
I missed company of course,
the way a body might miss corners,
being lost in that bedside-and-wall space,
a fissure day drops through,
the sweet ruelle. To lie on, leave
the world unseen, dissolve, and forget
what somehow you didn’t know
you knew you knew. Bedside, a bridge
you’d lean over in the night where
the fish slithy like intuition to
some weedy downstream address.
Garlic, and plenty of it in everything forever!
I’m in the kitchen with the music on,
cracking cloves from the provocative
bouquet on a chopping-board in Cork,
watched from the window by a star.
There were no corners on the moon,
but the nightingales were awesome
being altogether not there.
I scale back the skin with a thumbnail,
finely slice a crescent with the rest
and dance it in a skillet with bream.
Let the pungent Esperanto speak
from my pores for a week. Let the skin
be a scratchy module separating
on its way down to the Sea of Tranquillity
or maybe the Ocean of Storms.


Dean Browne received the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2021, and his pamphlet Kitchens at Night was a winner of the Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition; it was published in 2022. His first collection will be published by Picador this year