Featured Poet: March 2011 Vol. 3 #1
Ingrid Browning Moody
Ingrid Browning Moody’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, New South, RHINO, The Texas Review and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Arriving After Dark, won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize and will be published by Texas Review Press in fall 2011. She teaches writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Examining the Characters of a Foreign ALPHABET
You are illiterate
but they try anyway
to speak to you, hold out
their arms, gesture.
You see only
their bodies.
Some sit quietly eating,
some make piles of sand
with their long fingers,
some pick at moles,
smash plates.
Your own crooked
language numbs
on the tongue.
It asks for too much.
You are tired
of being battered
by words who will say
only one thing.
But these bodies:
some are moving
towards each other,
unbuttoning their shirts.
Some have already
disappeared
from this earth,
their clothes still warm,
falling.
~originally appeared in New South
___________
TAKING BACK THE AXEHEAD
The neighbors come to take what has not
been given to the church for charity
or to the few surviving friends, what is
not valuable enough to be divided
between the children. They pick through the rooms—
murmuring to each other as if shopping.
My mother tries to distract herself with
cleaning, but stops when the woman
from East Oak picks up the smooth, heavy stone,
one edge sharpened by some primal hand.
There had been so many things to save
that showed they had been recently touched
she did not think to keep a thing so ancient.
But seeing it in this stranger’s hand,
she can not bear it—its camber once
cupped in her mother’s palm, the stone
estranged from the lifespan of flesh.
~originally appeared in New South
___________
PRAYER 18
Lord, trash my house.
Take everything.
Lift the tiles with a surge
of mud. Snap the ping-pong table
in two. Burst the pipes
and flood this place,
let the La-Z-Boy float
and the family portrait go under.
Drown the cat, Lord,
the cat is yours.
Let the radiators hiss
and buckle.
Scorch my heirloom vanity.
Carve your infinite names
into the drywall,
blow the circuits
with your impenetrable hand.
Choke me with the smoke.
Come while I’m sleeping,
tear the curtains from the rod,
leave me
looking up through a blasted-out window.
I’ll stay there all night,
Lord, naked, charred, staring
at the gray stars,
if you promise not to forget
this wrecked lot,
if you promise
to remember me.
~originally appeared in RHINO