Poetry by Beth Gordon

Moving 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.

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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.

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