Poetry by Lisa Michelle Moore

             gordonplant CC




THE ONLY STATION UP THERE

played country music all-day and 
how Jesus can save your marriage
all-night

late in my bedroom bush basement
I’d twist the plastic Sears clock radio dial 

searching and receiving 
and one night I got lucky:

a station from Seattle
came into me from
                                                  the edge 
                                                  of the world
with my skinny legs
and creeping shyness
that had never 
seen the ocean

so a mid-winter gift 
of the weather:
the ionosphere 
escorting music 
over foothills 
and wheat fields
and highways filled 
with tanker trucks 
of bitumen

strange sounds
like scattering waves of animals 
running through 
the interior of the night 

Thurston Moore sighed 
through his alien transmission
all buzz and skin 
and New York steam:

Don’t you remember
you told me you love me, baby? 

the slow drizzle of car lights
across my bedroom walls
as slow static turned clear 
and back 

and from that night
an ache spread 
behind my ribs and 
between my hips
for places I’ve never seen 
for sounds and words 
and for desire itself 
now gestating 
in the great lake below my heart

the smell of Dad’s Player’s Lights 
burned down the back stairs
and the neighbour boys
slammed their car doors
 
and a cool blonde bang 
fell over the planet
of Kim Gordon’s right eye
 



​
​HUNTING PARTY

Your hunting buddies took you out one last time. They packed groceries and booze and two shotgun
shells filled with your ashes. They walked through muskeg in your honour and stalked moose and they
talked and they all agreed: the whole deal is bullshit. You get your head straight and your body
disintegrates. You work fifty years and die on a weekend. The black ink of your name will rub off of all
the objects and the people that you’ve claimed.

The dark hills had turned over in their sleep, their curves like hips rotating, sent the animals back into the
deeplands. Shit hunting luck and no meat. But they had whiskey and cigarettes and someone played
Sympathy for Devil from the cab of his truck and the fire grew to the height of a man and digested the
body of a pine tree into ash.

They sat, their foreheads hot against the fire and the music and felt you in a heavy ghost space. Then they
​loaded you into a rifle and pushed you back into the sky. 
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Lisa Michelle Moore is a health care provider and writer living at the longitudinal centre of Canada. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The Cold Mountain Review, The Cabinet of Heed, The Daily Drunk and The Quarantine Review. 

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