10/14/2017 Poetry by Beth GordonMoving Day While you are in Mississippi moving furniture from your childhood home, vacuuming cockroaches that survived in crevices for fifty years, giving away flowerpots and cutlery to strangers in the right place at the right time, driving with rum in a plastic cup, your backseat filled with boxes of newspaper articles, unable to decide which words to keep, which to discard, the temperature here drops twenty degrees. One year ago today we rode the train from Chicago to St. Louis, marveled at lush green cornfields, more rain forest than amber waves of grain, drank wine straight from the open bottle because we forgot to pack cups and did not speak of my daughters’ childhood friend, murdered by heroin, found face down eight hours after the crime. I was drinking too much then and now I wonder if I’m drinking enough, alone in six rooms, day after day content with background movie noise, my mother’s voice calling to see if my cough is dead, the manager of the local drugstore who doesn’t know whether to flirt or be concerned that I’m buying vodka on a cool Sunday morning, and 400 miles away with nothing left to pack, you are in a hotel shower, washing dirt from your pores, beneath your fingernails, letting the water flow hotter and hotter to rid your lungs of mold, of kudzu tears, of weeping printer’s ink. ![]() Bio: Beth Gordon is a writer who has been landlocked in St. Louis, Missouri for 16 years but dreams of oceans, daily. Her work has recently appeared in Into the Void, Quail Bell,Calamus Journal, DecomP, Five:2:One, Barzakh, and others. She can be found on Twitter @bethgordonpoet.
Catherine Zickgraf
10/16/2017 06:22:14 pm
Oh, this is gorgeous. Comments are closed.
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