Eric Pankey is the author of several poetry collections, including For the New Year, selected by Mark Strand as the winner of the 1984 Walt Whitman Award; Apocrypha; The Pear as One Example; and Trace (2013). Born in Kansas City in 1959, Pankey received his BA from the University of Missouri and an MFA from the University of Iowa. He is the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University and lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.


Photograph by Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

Lunar Calendar

by Eric Pankey

The moon is a midwife, who delivers a bundle of salt.

The moon sheds a spring-fed light, white as the limestone

in Galena, Illinois.

The moon is a knuckle gashed to the bone.
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