Jennifer Moore

Hello, Goodbye

When nothing began,
you tethered yourself

to the West
and let the ball fly.

You let mileage do the work
of pointing a finger

and squaring a jaw.
Hear that? A baby cries through

someone else’s monitor.
A baby cries

through another radio,
someone turns a corner

down. A page listens.
More or less, you’re the din

in my hard-of-hearing ear,
while the other’s pressed against

this decade’s sure crib.
How the night clears up

isn’t clear at all--
it’s not a logic that gets us
​
but the wick of a feeling.
If I had something to say

it would be this: Come outside
with me, but ignore the moon.

---

She Seemed to Arrive Slowly

 
For hours I pulled toward you, sea star—

I was a traveling pause, I went
deliberately across that dark floor.

The sand created clouds of my lungs.
Taking pleasure in holding zero,

my hands stirred the water and made
ornaments of oyster shells.

To charm your five fingers,
I unrolled a fog from my ear—
​
a long signature to know me by,
a dim and dissolving sugar. Star,

you are the evening that’s easy to keep near.

---

The Photo Shoot

I am told to sidle up
to a tree; I ask its limbs

to surround my own
with leaves. There is a clothing there

is a clothing. Under a canopy of lenses
I subvert my self. I am almost

invisible. If my eyes would dilate
they would be two acorns.

There is something
about the veins and pores of flora

that my body responds to
by becoming unseen, becoming

too small to see; what’s left
are a few bobby pins

and one clavicle. It might be
another body’s branch.

The thing that’s difficult
is the timing of it all. Knowing

when to breathe. Knowing when
to do anything, to ask for water,

for a robe or a mirror, to ask for a mirror.
To ask for proof of the shot,

of the shoot that emerged
years after my body left.




--
Jennifer Moore has poems published or forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Best New Poets, The Volta, Columbia Poetry Review and elsewhere, and criticism in Jacket2 and The Offending Adam. She holds degrees from the University of Colorado and the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Ohio Northern University.