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Gone Lawn 67
hunter's moon, 2026
(October 25)

Featured artwork,
Longing, by Chris Jeanguenat

new works

Madeleine Moon-Chun

You Know this Universe


Two days after you died we visit the playground before any children wake. I push you on the swing because every child knows you go higher that way, and every child wants to go higher. Up there, even a person can be large enough to shade the ground from the whole sun. I know it, looking back. Looking up, I see you, a child, and no sun. A black hole no one has to travel an infinity away from to see. Down the street, the houses sleep, not knowing what they miss. Look, I want to yell, your neighbor is alive again. But it wouldn’t be polite to give you an audience you didn’t ask for. Somewhere, some middle-aged man waits for your teenage kidney. When it grows to fit his body, his children and his future grandchildren will say, Thank God. Many living people you don’t know will have a cutout of you in their minds to thank. Isn’t that what a celebrity is? You don’t want to swing anymore, I get it. It’s time to go back home, so I say something else: It is the breakdown of your body, the point of singularity, that I hope for you, now more than ever.


Madeleine Moon-Chun lives in Atlanta. An alumna of the Iowa Young Writers' Studio, she has previously been published by The Incandescent Review and Mukoli. She edits a birding newsletter and tries to write down more than her dreams in the mornings.