Ina Cariño

The Moon Could Never Love Me

I am tired of telling the moon of its beauty.

it is waiting for the kind of praise that only

someone foreign to this Earth could give it.

I paint my face the colors of the universe.

chartreuse, azure. kaleidoscopic black.

my dead grandfather would be proud:

he used to say that honesty is a willingness.

can you tell the moon when it is being ugly?

when it is the ugliest to me? the tide is

pulled in the direction of stardust but I am

a bit wretched these days. no, the moon

could never love me. it pushes me over

the edge of my bed. & I would never love

the moon back      honest, honest to god.

Ina Cariño is a 2022 Whiting Award winner for poetry. Their work appears in the American Poetry Review, the Margins, Guernica, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Magazine, the Paris Review Daily, Waxwing, New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman fellow and is the winner of the 2021 Alice James Award for Feast, published by Alice James Books in March 2023. In 2021, Ina was selected as one of four winners of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. In 2019, Ina founded a poetry reading series called Indigena Collective, a platform that aims to center marginalized creatives in the NC community and beyond.