By Sam Moe
Assuming a forest won’t stay the same rooting around pastures for clover sunset like green goddess sauce muscles ache I’ve lost track of heaven my hair is a bun of twigs, I can’t recall the last dandelion, sauce will be sweet stop recalling the way she bit her lip, her crying and your lying, siempre estás con hambre, doesn’t matter, you touch and scrape by on family mealtime grew a new lawn on the back porch, harvested freshwater sharks whose eyes reflect nail polish and damn these woods, nadie sabe nada but at least you’ve kept your heart at a swooping pastel pastern the reeds have been gathered in buckets and folktale water begins to flood clicking and biting your feet, you see her at the mouth of the jaws of the jaws of the forest and for a second you are dreaming, she isn’t really there she’s making resin tables on Madison Avenue, she’s in scratched red sneakers in the back of someone’s van, snorting lines of coke off a ruby guitar, or maybe she está comiendo un corazón sin dientes, maybe sleeping beneath a pile of cable knit sweaters she stole from a recently-seduced sea captain, or perhaps she’s kissing the receiver of the last payphone in Manhattan, either way, it’s end-of-the-road startle, it’s brittle love and young potatoes, she’s not really here, you’re imagining the scent of clove and why wouldn’t you you’re in a field of clover, but the others stop their work, some pause with the edible flower buckets poised mid-pick, others have tripped over roots and lay on their sides in disbelief others still are leaning against trees like they’re coaxing them straight from the earth, and she is walking towards you, arms outstretched, a mess, you wake up elevated in a cloud of grief, birdsong is floating through an open window like a promise.
Sam Moe is the recipient of a 2023 St. Joe Community Foundation Poetry Fellowship from Longleaf Writers Conference. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Whale Road Review, The Indianapolis Review, Sundog Lit, and others. Her poetry book Heart Weeds is out from Alien Buddha Press (Sept. ’22) and her chapbook Grief Birds is out from Bullshit Lit (Apr. ’23). Her full-length Cicatrizing the Daughters is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press.