Love Poem by the Light of a Documentary about the Texarkana Moonlight Murderer
Alisha Dietzman
Texarkana, 1946: a woman shot in the face offers her loose
tooth—the gold fillings, I mean—as payment
for the backseat mess
in the moonlight.
If I didn’t know your name I’d also call you moonlight.
The patent-black blood all over the car like eels,
but what was light, was so light,
you’d never forget
the knee.
Alisha Dietzman is a PhD candidate in Divinity focusing on aesthetics and ethics at the University of St Andrews, supported by a grant from the US-UK Fulbright Commission. Her work has also received support from the Rebecca Swift Foundation and the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park. Her poetry has appeared or will appear in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere.
