Necessity

… and speaking of moons: I don't believe,
necessarily, there was one.
—Rachel Zucker, "A Kind of Catastrophe"

there wasn't a father
there wasn't a mother
there was a hole where the moon
should have been
there wasn't a house
just a sort of gray box
we couldn't see through the walls
and we couldn't hide behind them
a knife could not open
locked doors where dragons
nothing wailing
prowled the moonless ice
light kept failing and I didn’t want
to see my shadow
there wasn't an animal
dragging its bloody leg
there wasn't a face
looking in the window
there wasn't
there wasn't