Leah Mooney
Truthfully, I have never set out to write an epistolary poem. They are often born in revision. Either a poem becomes addressed to such a definitive You, it is only natural, or, as in this particular poem, the form allows for a marriage between two parts that were otherwise struggling to be a whole. The latter is what I enjoy most about this form, I think. An unexpected mix of correspondents can work to create tension or layers of meaning in a poem. A speaker pondering existential questions with a french-fry eating bird suddenly not only gave me a vehicle for the poem, but some how reflected how odd and unbalanced our questions for the universe tend to be in the first place.
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Dear Blackbird Eating a Sodden French Fry Outside My Office Window
Sometimes it seems the light will never return,
but today ice melts to reveal feast enough.
You have foraged beautifully.
The fried potato twixt your beak is fatter than any worm
in spring.
I wonder, if in your feathered language,
there is a word for this good fortune,
or one for the moments which fall between
like earthquakes.
I want to believe in this.
I want to tell you the body is a monument,
a vivid ethereal scaffold erected
for cellular strips, draped like paper mache ,
given motion, birth, the ability to drink a cup of coffee,
walk dogs, seek friction of odd looking parts.
On the wall behind you,
someone has spray painted this in red:
This list of things the gods envy us is long.
Do you think it is our hunger
or our good fortune
they would envy?
I’m sure they have plenty
of everything.
Wouldn’t you think?
Always tempting us to forge lives, naked
in towers of blood-oranges
and poetry. I suppose it’s like that.
Conspiring--before they render rocks
languorous with night fog,
begging them to whisper the risks of being steady.
It gets to me sometimes.
Our need for steady, I mean.
Steady hands, steady ground,
warm rooms with
lamps and bright cushioned furniture--
is this is their suffering?
Are they fervently
banging at the other side of the glass,
What will it take to make you see, they say--
What to shake
so that you mortals might live--
you paper things in inevitable rain?
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Leah Mooney writes in the small town wilds of western Wisconsin where she lives with her husband and daughter. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Boxcar Poetry Review, Atticus Review, Fiction 365, Tilt-a-Whirl and A River and Sound Review.