Volume 2, Issue 1
Inventory
Nancy Carol Moody
The day collapses in on itself
colors slipping
over the edge
Earlier, a checklist of routine:
gas/car
library/books
drugstore/card
grocery/geometries:
1 box cereal
3 cans beans
onion/melon/orange
cylinder of oatmeal
another of sorbet
Home again—the inevitable
unloading
unpacking
food to pantry/freezer/fridge
Later to the closet for hat/gloves,
slather of sunscreen
bucket/trowel/hoe from the workshed
sweat and mud
Piled by the drive—hillock
of clover/dandelion/thistle
Mow/water/feed/mow/water/feed/mow
Reverse motion—
stow tools/unwrap sungarb
*
This house is a rebus
Walls inside walls, glyphs
to figure the spaces—
bath
bed
kitchen
living
On the hearth, a broken-necked vase
dry heads of last year's poppies
crimped over the ruined lip/
photos eyeing from a cool distance/
7-foot wood giraffe unblinking in thin air
Moving now
from room to room, trailing
fingertip across mantle/counter/tabletop
singular track through scrim
of this day's dust
books unread
telephone blinking/blinking/
blinking
drippy faucet/flap of molding/crack
in the windowglass
those things I said
those things I shouldn't have
Nancy Carol Moody's work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, PANK,
The New York Quarterly, Bellevue Literary Review and The MacGuffin.
Her book, Photograph With Girls, was published in 2009 by Traprock Books.
Nancy lives in Eugene, Oregon, and can be found online at www.nancycarolmoody.com.