Featured Poet: March 2011 Vol. 3 #1

admin — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 17:24:08 +0000

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

» Ingrid Browning Moody

Featured Poet: March 2011 Vol. 3 #1