2020 / poetry / author

ELLENE GLENN MOORE

 

IN BALTIMORE COUNTY

…

I.

He hands me a Winchester 22, 
presses the butt of the rifle 
against the fleshiest piece of my shoulder, 
between breastplate and scrawny arm. 
Not much kickback in its slender trunk, 
but the wooden stock is a heft into my body.

Here beneath the bewildered leaves,
the shot cracks like a branch
splitting in a storm.

II.

In this corner of the field
our lives are a litany of trees:
black walnut masking a hawk,
maple, sycamore, callery pear,
beech, hickory and oak.

III.

The sun burns, muscle 
above our straw heads,
engine of this car still steaming 
with the fragile bodies 
of mosquitos and grasshoppers.

I drive circles in the wheat,
channels of mud and rock in my wake, 
shovel stalling in the trunk. 
I drag it along the stubbly ground, dig
where he points, kicking up a dark smell, 
humid soil held together 
by tender white roots 
of tall fescue and rye, 
chickweed, nutsedge, the crack of crabgrass. 

IV.

How small the bullets are. 
When I press one into my palm 
it barely leaves a mark.

V.

I hold my worried breath
still as the pool collected 
by stones we laid last summer,
where I sink a thin hook,
waiting for a tug from the muddy water. 

VI.

He hands me a Winchester 22, 
says We’ll start at 10 yards.
The hay bale is swollen with storm, 
smelling sweet and dim 
like honey from buckwheat, 
full of the field’s body, pockets of clay 
pressed into the earth 
like hands.

VII.

We dig into the earth, 
cool our faces in stream,
water unspooling itself around smooth stones.
Once, I catch a glint of a fish on my hook.
We fry it in fatback, clean flesh crackling, 
make cornbread hot in the toaster 
on top of the washing machine.

HOMAGE IN MANY GREENS

…

after Josef Albers

Between the cattails a reedy, perverse honking asserts itself as something beautiful in the now-tired daylight. The sun declines to comment; the sun is stroking herself behind the pines. All is verdant—such a sea of cool leaves, the pond muddying the sky’s clear naivety—those plump, puckering dives, the metallic grin of a mallard’s back, this blade of grass, or that. The water works itself into a tizzy. The water is sick with it.

 
 

…

Ellene Glenn Moore is a writer living in sunny South Florida. Her poetry has appeared in Lake Effect, Best New Poets, Caliban, The Journal, and others, and her prose has appeared in Brevity, Fjords Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Ellene earned her MFA in creative writing at Florida International University, where she held a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellowship in Poetry. Her chapbook The Dark Edge of the Bluff (Green Writers Press, 2017) was runner-up for the Hopper Prize for Young Poets.

WHERE TO FIND ELLENE GLENN MOORE:WEBSITE


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