Jonatha Moya

- After Rainier Maria Rilke


The washers have lived with death
...

It was the light that told Vincent,
the one which always told him the truth
reflected his soul's desire,
the glistenings of his mind,
...

(In homage to William Carlos William)

Outside was my red bicycle
leaning against the wall
...

Perfection can only be seen in the descent,
the glow of spotlights colliding to true whiteness,
the realization that grief touches the ground.
...

Ariana, adopted the old Greek ways,
when Nikos died diving for sponges.
She encased her curses into two lead stones:
smuggling one into his coffin,
...

I asked the haberdasher
to make me a new soul.
something inexpensive
and lighter than 21 grams
...

What will happen
when we
stop writing poems?
...

When the giant bagel fell from the sky
everyone complained when it blocked the road.
Even when children cut it into pieces
and passed it out, lathered with shmear and lox
...

There once was a race of cake men
equally divided between
birthday and wedding types,
each born into whatever flavor
...

Man has
a map of the galaxy
for his body,
a map of his genes
...

The seed planted with our small help
becomes a crop.
The flame carefully kindled by us
ignitescivilization.
...

. Poetry can kill you
when you shut
yourself inside of it.
...

It's in the shading.
It's the way the light is written.
It's the way the observer takes it all in.
It's the way it convinces one that the world will last.
...

. am not a sailor.
I am meant to die on land,
ashes spread above sea level,
or in a coddled urn above the hearth.
...

The soul is not a drip-dry thing.
It's needs constant washing and wringing
to function cleanly.
It needs to tumble on high heat
...

The poet makes his gun out of any old thing:
sticks of words,bird song, the swish of trees,
the pitter patter of the growing city around him,
...

The moon was neither
voiced into creation
nor was it defined.
...

Up

A seed is a forest-to be.
A rock is a mountain-to-be.
...

What is the land
but dust
but mountains
but forrest
...

Her name you may
or may not recall.
It was Chrissie,
the body in the sand dune.
...