Mary Moore’s forthcoming book, Eating the Light, was selected by Allison Joseph as the winner of Sable Books 2016 contest. She also has individual poems out this year in Birmingham Poetry Review, One, Cider Press Review, McNeese Review, and work forthcoming in Unsplendid and Coal Hill Review. Other recent publications have appeared in Terrain, Nimrod, The Moth, Drunken Boat, Cider Press Review’s Best of Volume 16, Unsplendid, One, and more. Earlier poems were published in Poetry, Field, and many more. Her first full-length poetry collection, The Book of Snow was published by Cleveland State University.---------
If Doughnuts Were Wishes
I heard the band playing in the coffee shop
CDs of Sousa marches and thought
no patriotism for me the last of my people
but I can enjoy all the doughnuts
I want and not die since love
already slims me down like speed
I can eat those airy ones they glove
in sugar cooked into light though I’m full
with thinking of you thinking of me brushing
my skin with your eyes
we stood drinking possibility
at the coffee bar and I outed myself
as loverless Boy, I could tense my thighs
my stomach as if wishes were flesh
Almost Woman
The river forms of expectation,
undulant, mutable, a ribbed
glass streamer distance proffers
between the lodge-pole pines
at the bend where she might stand.
She’s serpentine and formed
of erasure, innuendo.
Spruces and red pines ripple
on the shallows
where the head should be
haloed with these reflections.
Past nets of tree-limbs cross-hatching
the absence where thighs should be,
the river descends the stairs
at the falls, unbridled
and scolding the rock-bench.
What the stones glint to your eyes
looks like impossible breasts,
but what they become when the amorous
projection of rock, brow-bone
on the ridge, leans into nightfall
is anybody's guess.
She almost forms then slips
out of sight, never become
remorse, dying back into sources,
earth, water, rock.
Though the viridian
hair of weeds might fringe
a stone like thought, she’s gone,
or has never arrived.
But the river keeps devising the places
it laves, loves and leaves,
recursive canyons,
gullies, moist traces in the rock,
descent, its only desire.
The quartz-rich silt
glints in it, a mineral fire.
Wind Worshipper
The dust devil’s name made me
love it, red blond tornado kid
no taller than me
dervisher wind worshipper even dozers
by John Deere can’t kill
it’s made only of loam wind-shear and spin
its little red eye untrackable since holes
in the barely there aren’t really here
I loved to stand in the whirl
and whimsy breath held eyes
shut, hands out so delicate the force a sigh
of wings like butterflies like the eye lashes
I’d learn of lovers brushing quick flashes
from synapse to synapse yes yes