Svetlana Litvinchuk

On How to Sleep During a Full Moon

What I know of holding back water is our long and storied history of damming anything that resembles river. We fear the water’s flow, just as we fear our own greatness, our obliteration, our undoing. But what we fear is precisely our True North. On nights like this one, I go to the river to learn her language so I may recognize wisdom when I finally hear it. I want to learn how to flow when the sky is too bright to sleep. I want to learn how to swim through darkness with eyes closed, guided by starlight, fearing nothing. I, too, want to howl at the moon. I, too, am restless with wanting to make music just once in my life. It is the river who teaches me balance—the way it doesn’t mean temperance or restraint, but rather ebb and flow. How balance is the contrast of extremes—not merely constancy. It means allowing in both stability and chaos. It means allowing our multitudes to cycle like the moon, to move from too much to too little and back again, and, in the process, sometimes, to overflow. Like a river cradles its floodplain, so, too, we must test our waters to find our edges and let them finally dissolve. The Earth would crack to hold it all in, the mountains would erode, the shore would open its mouth and swallow itself. To move immovable mountains: push from the inside, let the water out. Dear one, do you hear the drums beating louder? Perhaps this is not the time for sleep.

Becoming water may be
the only way I know
to keep from drowning.

Svetlana Litvinchuk is the author of a poetry chapbook, Only a Season (Bottlecap Features, 2024) and a forthcoming full-length poetry collection, Navigating the Hallways by Starlight (spring 2026). Nominated for Pushcart, Best of the Net, and a finalist for the Slippery Elm Poetry Prize, her poetry appears in ANMLY, swamp pink, About Place, Strange Horizons, Rust + Moth, Sky Island Journal, Arkana, and elsewhere. She is the Managing Editor of ONLY POEMS and a Guest Editor for Rockvale Review in 2025. Find her on Instagram @s.litvinchuk and www.svetlanalitvinchuk.com