Julie L. Moore
Abundance
My neighbor’s orchard looks like Christmas,
red and green apples like glass balls
brimming on branches,
though the sweet flesh is so heavy,
some of the stems snap.
Fallen, the fruit will fill
with the songs of worms.
The grove smells like blue
cradling the October sky, like the end
of hunger, like grace in the tender
dance of sacrifice, one life for another,
the skin soon to be pierced
with blade, or thorn-
sharp bite.
Family Portrait
I’ll be dead in two weeks
you said after we posed for the photograph
in our twenty-first year together.
It was good we did it, you said,
so the kids and I could look at you in your last days
for the rest of our lives.
You’d found your third clot in your leg,
the bruise behind your knee
spreading like a crooked smile.
Your blood pressed hard
against your arteries, lashing out
like an ungrateful child.
Your heart you feared wicked,
the thing that failed you once
and despite all the promises,
might fail you again soon.
O how grief has hung on us.
Nailed to our home like an image on a wall.
Our heads pounding with the memory
of death’s unforgettable face,
a face that was here and there
and everywhere, conspicuous
in the picture of your health.
Sightseeing
We drove through Yellowstone,
winding through its burnt edges, blackened trees on one side,
lush hills on the other, in the middle of June.
The traffic was insane,so entirely out of place
(like New York City meetsWalden Pond), engines
burning up serenitylike fire consumes aspen
and pine, exhaust casting its dark shadow onto the road,
as we slowed to a stopbeside a buffalo.
Within the short lengthof my arm, it lounged
like a Lab. They have rulesin the park, and this proximity
broke one. I could’ve touched its mane, full as a huckleberry bush,
brown as the earth itself,if I’d wanted to.
I could’ve fingered the sharp tipsof its horns if I’d dared.
And while my kids tried to enforce the law from the back seat,
my husband nervous at the wheel,I did what anyone does
when she looks into the eyes of endurance, crosses the border
beyond belief. I rolled down my window, zoomed in close,
and snapped the picture. [9/09]
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Julie L. Moore is the author of Slipping Out of Bloom, forthcoming in 2010 from WordTech Editions, and the chapbook, Election Day (Finishing Line Press). Moore is a Pushcart Prize nominee and recent recipient of the Rosine Offen Memorial Award from the Free Lunch Arts Alliance in Illinois, winner of the Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize from Ruminate: Faith in Literature and Art and the Judson Jerome Poetry Scholarship to the Antioch Writers' Workshop. Moore has contributed poetry to Alaska Quarterly Review, Cimarron Review, The MacGuffin, and others. She lives in Ohio where she directs the Writing Center at Cedarville University.
