Chloë Moore

Semiotics

The mountain is most interesting
when the sun goes down. Ghost hill,
imminent obscurity of settling fog.
In the paranoid morning my visibility shrinks.
The sky in careful hush, handful of late afternoon snow,
sidewalk with confetti of broken glass.
Cars with their wipers up, the sodden bottoms
of unhemmed pants, quarters clinking in a cup. 

Pain comes bright, fast, maneuverable,
the phantom moon and superfluous ocean singing back
to one another in the afternoon of the year. It’s snowing
in all my old hometowns and I miss you more than I should.
My heart aches like a tooth; I’m on a diet
of chewed-off lip skin and dried blood. I know the way home
with my eyes closed, and the lights off, in the first snow.

The desolate evening’s white-knuckled grip on the light.
The structural integrity of a cigarette
and the cat Tokyo drifting down the alley.
Blue salt on the street and a fogged window.
I have arranged the furniture of my life around
the emptiness. The center is porous and elusive but it holds.

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Chloë Moore is a writer from central New York. She writes about the body and place. Her work appears in or is forthcoming from Camas Magazine, Shō Poetry, Public School Poetry and elsewhere. An MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Montana, she currently lives in Missoula.