The new moon tonight comes at the same time as snow showers, the first fresh white quickening in more than a week. Already the city is quieter, muffled, it's sounds and lights refracted in a thousand ways. The traffic light outside my bedroom window cycles endlessly, and I imagine the pedestrian tracks and tires in the street impressing themselves onto a surface at once marked and endlessly changing. In this place I too have learned to be a cycle. The moon pulls me up toward the sky and north toward the lake, a pale insistence I can hear in my blood and my guts. Tonight it's slight presence leaves me loosened, boundless, a cacophony in my heartbeat just waiting to take flight. There is carrion in the middle distance and I am hungry, but they will call it scavenging and judge my curved talons for the drip of old blood. I am too ready for a clean heart, heavy mouth, empty street. I feed and leave the carcass bones as slim and white as the moon that showed me the way.