ITEM FOUND IN A DRESSER DRAWER
A watch, left by my mother and broken-- as were her all. (She kept the jeweler in business for years.) She would do the same with mine—break them, that is-- wrapping my newest timepiece on her wrist on Christmas or birthday mornings, the bright hands stalling, fixing the instant. Halted time tucked gleaming back into the velvet- lidded box until the repair shop opened for business the next day. I thought that was the only death in her, my soft mother, killer of watches. Pocket, wrist, locket-- she could stop them all. But beneath, neither in ticker nor muscle, rocked in the sling of breast-flesh, another sort of chronometer loomed. How slight a movement of one hand would it have taken to admit the lump when it was new as a stopwatch, pristine in its pouch and still under warranty. But no-- by then she had grown accustomed to it, you see. The box. Its snapped-closed lid. |
© Nancy Carol Moody
"Item Found in a Dresser Drawer" appears in The House of Nobody Home (FutureCycle Press, 2016) |
REINCARNATION
To come back (to have come back) as something kinder would be (would have been) a kindness. Blue glass dish for the finches to splash in. Middle C ribboning through a din. And still I cannot cross the plains without seeing on every barbed fence a boy tied there. Headlamp newly on or soon to be flicked off. Next time will be moths. A mausoleum untended is seepage. Sometimes to melt is the only way out. Let there be one tool precisely milled for the doing. Or undoing. To return as apple. To bleed nothing but clear juice. |
© Nancy Carol Moody
"Reincarnation" appears in The House of Nobody Home (2016, FutureCycle Press) |
TABLECLOTH
You know that old trick-- grasping one edge and jerking it so fast and clean that the plates and glasses remain in place, just an afterthought of shimmer left to record the stun. We think of it as magic, but what hasn't been yanked from beneath us-- and still we're left standing. |
© Nancy Carol Moody "Tablecloth" appears in The House of Nobody Home (FutureCycle Press, 2016) |
BOX OF ROCKS
Halfway beneath a table, lid torn back, $2 scrawled in black marker on the side, these yard-sale rocks, heavy as regret. Two dollars, the price of an accumulation. Scumbled with mud, collaged in dry leaf, bits of cobweb, the lost wings of insects, they glint like old loves, rugged stars. They too had lives once, arrived in this unlikely place because someone spotted a moon in them because a hand reached out and said, You. O to have been the one chosen, the hurried heartbeat of that. Dimple, curvature, an angle of polish. An arm that curled itself around our shape, and in its closing became our shape. To have come through the tumbling. And then, this hardness we were shouldered into, the dismal weight of us. Lid folded down, the cardboard darkness, our hearts ticking, one against another. |
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IN THE BEGINNING
Apple, tell me your name. Spell it with alphabets I can imagine. Hand signs will do, those flapping wings, bluster a verb I long to bite into. Oxidation burns only part of the story. Allow me a slice beyond your skin, bitter, bursting with flesh. |
WHEN THEY ASK ABOUT MY FACE
I will say something about snow, the skittered tracks of a hare just prior to the hush I will say wind bores salt into sea-boards, taut rope burns a furrow, leaf-rust in spring autumns elms Hoarfrost bit by hob nail meadow after the scythe the dory's barnacled hull a peppermint held too long against the palate When they ask about my face, I will say that even a trodden carriage leaves wheelmarks in the stone, that shrapnel can flare a staggering tattoo, that left to their own devices, sparks of midnight fireworks will carve ferocious trails into the black wax of the sky © Nancy Carol Moody
WHEN THEY ASK ABOUT MY FACE first appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 1 |
THE CHERRIES AT TIFFANY'S
The plastic cherries near the drug store entrance look so real that the clerk tells us about the children who come in, so taken with what seems genuine that they dip their hands instinctively in the bowl, lift their faces and hold the dazzling fruit to their mouths. Such lustrous deception-- red layered upon deeper red, occasional flecks like sparks flaring, the thin stem a complex of green-woven filaments, a fibrous braid of grass, beckoning. Who wouldn't be seduced by this gleam and polish? These cherries, small charmers, are such cunning imposters that even we, soft and jowly from middle age, jaded by a lifetime of gimmickry and artifice, cannot resist the impulse to reach into the bowl and disprove the illusion, our hopeful fingers hungry for the small and tender heft, the delicious resistance of the flesh. © Nancy Carol Moody
THE CHERRIES AT TIFFANY'S first appeared in The Broad River Review, Vol. 44, Spring 2012 |
CIRCUMSCRIPTION
Confused Sea Turtles March into Restaurant — Rome (Reuters, August 19, 2008) The moon angles in from an odd degree, and the hatchlings, instinct their only context, ferry their new armor toward shimmer and gleam, light an emollient of liquid vibrato runneling the surface of this black world. What do the turtles understand of water, their unseasoned flippers all grasp and scatter as they scuff their way across the sand, the line dividing earth from sea indiscernible beneath the night sky's nebulous swirl? How can they make one single thing of this august moon, blazing disc of ice both out there and elsewhere, nothing but primordial breath to bargain the space between? It's not bewilder that draws them into this misconstrued light; it's all seduction: thrum of blue neon pulsing above the café door, shivers of candlelight refracting through the windowglass, the chrome and glisten of tablescapes. Electrics masquerade as element, afterimage postures as unbounded brilliance. And the turtles-- hapless, euphoric-- trundle headlong into this treacherous bright: the gloss and polish of the dining room floor beckoning like moonshine enkindling the sea, chandeliered starlight reflecting in a drowning pool. |
SEXTANT
There, she said, when I kissed her northeast. I had been headed south. Once, celestial bodies were sighted on the horizon. Once, it had been believed that the stars were enough. |
ZORSE
Future zorses will combine the speed and savvy of zebras with the friendliness of horses --Associated Press They’re doing it in the mountains. The woman’s spent years courting the zebra—handled him since the day he came out. Now she orders the lights stay up. Muzak be piped into the barn. When the mood is just right, she fires him into mounting the mare, tricks his semen to the jar in her hand. Fifteen- hundred bucks a shot. Orders come from as far as France. I imagine it happening in early morning: the summit in blue shadow, sun zig-zagging crazily through abandoned lifts. Lupines scream. Seedlings explode, sudden as mines. The melt is high and the lake is full. Water flees the paunched lips of the dam, hollers down the mountainside where further along, Girl Scouts in tents and mummy- bags stretch the soreness of rocks from their bones, remembering: a night of charred dogs and S’mores, blushed secrets and songs, the discord of nature just outside a fire- ring of stones. |
EROS
Pallor of ash, homely as a potato, the asteroid named Eros tumbles end-over-end in its loopy orbit around the sun. For a year a space probe, flimsy cylinder of foil and shields, has been courting the rock, making its passes, circling closer, spawning photos it sends one hundred ninety-six million miles to Earth. But now the probe’s batteries are running down, the satellite spent beyond usefulness. Two day short of Valentine’s, it makes the plunge to the rock’s cratered surface where, despite all predictions and the uncertain perils of proximity, the probe continues its lonely habit, the camera shuttering glimpses of a geography unfathomed. Marooned on the lovely and windless plains of Eros, unable to align its panels to the sun, the probe at best can survive a month before its snapshots dim finally into dusk, that delicate, moonlit darkness where honeymoons begin. |
A HISTORY OF FLIGHT
Of course they used ungodly words, those two Wright boys—no contraption ever works the first time out. They measured and considered, pursed their lips and scratched their heads. When they first flew their gliders, had they really thought it through, the ultimatums of success—the thirst for power beyond wind? Or that some would curse as heathen acts their flights of derring-do? But God, who hadn’t been so popular in years, was thrilled to host these guys with guts enough to fly in the face of gravity. He let them rise, watched them through binoculars-- they looked a lot more fun than celibates. Why should He mind their little blasphemies? © Nancy Carol Moody
A HISTORY OF FLIGHT first appeared as "The History of Flight" in Talking River Review, Summer, 2002 |
NESTING
June, and the insatiable starlings just outside our bedroom window are raising their second batch of babies this season, rackety blusterers tucked into the eaves of the house next door. Mornings at sunup, the nest is a tumult of appetite and squawk. Evenings, in the melancholy low-light of the just-set sun, the drama recycles: cacophony, then a quiet. The outcome is not so different from the creation: how the light turns and a hunger rises. Sound becomes us, and then there is the silence. © Nancy Carol Moody
NESTING first appeared in Photograph With Girls (Traprock Books, 2009) and was reprinted in Jefferson Monthly, March, 2012 |
IN A WORD
Imagine a chair. It might have a tall back, curvaceous legs, a red, come-hither cushion. You see her, don't you? Not a chair any longer. How did that happen? How could a simple chair be transformed so completely, not in a day, but in a breath? Back up. Let's look at that. See it now, the chair. Blood-red, hard-cast steel, thick rods to shape its spine, how the seat is like stone. Can you see the difference? This chair, its indifferent eye, stares back at you, pressing, yet not quite pressing a large knot deep into your gut, the red- black clot of you pressing back, and you not grasping how all of this just happened. The chair, after all, is just a chair—a sea change, isn't it? So you see, what they say is true: You are not invulnerable. A simple chair has entered you. It has read your mind, your beastly heart. How weak you are proved to be, back- stabbed by language, at the beck and call of simple words. See how an image can hold you, how you are not immune? You are not any more to language than red meat. Word bait. That chair up there was not ever yours. Go back to the top, start with the red. See again the chair. Ask yourself how. |