Elegy
There is nothing new to say about love.
When I last slept next to you
I dreamed a newborn with your voice
talked to me about it
as I held and nursed him. My body
is always looking
for new ways to contain you.
It’s easy to make a metaphor of death—
rotting corpse and carriage ride, stealthy
robber bee, stubborn, pouting child.
What I miss most are the meals
you bought me. Your hunger at the end
as wide as the sky in drought.
Lament
It’s autumn. Chilly enough tonight to make the college girls
cross their arms tightly across their chests
as they run, coatless, from bar to bar in screaming packs.
I’d take any one of them home just to be close
to that kind of confidence again—tight shirts and forced cleavage,
lips so glossed I can see my reflection, the total
self-absorption. Sex rises off them like steam
from a pile of raked leaves, and I want to gather it up, touch it once more.
Memory can be so concentrated: all the big moments,
the emotions and the knowing funneled into a tight stream,
a small circle’s width. If these girls even remember tonight […]
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Amanda Moore holds an MFA from Cornell University, where she served as managing editor for EPOCH. Moore’s poems have appeared in journals such as Third Coast, Cream City Review, and 5AM, and in anthologies such as Best New Poets and Mamas & Papas. Moore currently lives in San Francisco with her husband, daughter, and stacks of high school English papers waiting to be graded.