Bastard

Dad was born the year before she was
in Georgetown or Westville or one of the dirty little towns
on the narrow road that bleeds south out of Danville,
Illinois. Mom didn't have a chance. The
Depression tore through the western
Indiana countryside like a tornado.
Hate can be a kind of stain. She used to talk
about how her parents refused to buy
black market sugar. Backbone wasn't scarce
in that torn apart landscape. Corn tassels
teasing the wind, field after level field.
She never met her real father. I remember Dad
mimicking a chicken in our prefab kitchen,
how he got right in Mom's face.
Flour was cheap in '31, if you had work.
Dust covered everything, dust, and want.



The Country of the Soul

Tonight I can hear the ticking of the living
room clock above the steady pounding of rain.
Earlier on the phone my stepmother Ava said it was liver cancer
this time, inoperable, her voice cracking slightly
as she held her end of the line. He hadn't eaten
for two weeks before the last test, over the weekend
my sister had said his color was still good, everyone else
was mute, as helpless as a gagged man at a robbery.
He wasn't surprised, Ava said, he wasn't surprised.
He'd been building his life for months as if ebb
and flow were a reflection of the wind, or the wind itself,
bearing down like an assassin or a horse without a rider.
Now it's the space heater rattling behind me that holds
my attention, if only for a moment, then I leave again.
There's a cloud over my head, I'm riding the heaviness
of grief, a pilgrim without a horse in the country
of the soul, black mountains shining in the distance,
or could it be the sun, vibrant, tireless, its love
for all things constant, nourishing as garlic soup
or oat groats, warm in the stomach, the valley
where death dare not enter.



I'm dying

    or
coming alive at last. I'm
electric. I may never
pay the electric bill again. My
car
      needs new tires, because like my socks,
none of them match. I can't stop thinking
about death, the difference
between being and
being too dead to know the
universe is expanding and
collapsing. I'm growing
smaller as I learn
daily. Asleep
I'm more alive than ever. Everything
happens
at the same time.



Experts

                    August 2004



My son leaves empty containers in the fridge.
He only shrugs when I ask him not to.
I try to wrap my head around why no one

talks about Cambodia
and the unexploded bombs Nixon
secretly dropped there while wreaking havoc

in lonely Vietnam. These thoughts
kept me up late when I was an adolescent.
Things didn't add up.

Then there was the larger world.
I can't stop eating dark
chocolate. I miss the last president

though be betrayed everyone
by pushing NAFTA
and when he bombed Libya

it was because of a rumor.
Me; I chose joy. I can walk away
from sugar. I can walk away

from liars. You're as free
as you want to be. Just like a baby,
a baby left out in the rain.



Little League

I lost one summer
            waiting for a white
      ball to drop

out of infield lights.
            When Billy walked up to bat
      coach waved

the outfield back
            into the dark. I fell
      into the uncut grass,

and lay there, listening
            to my own breath. A boy
      called out my name—

I couldn't even find my voice.
            The minutes felt
      flat as a slow inning,

then I stood in the tunnel
            of gray lights,
      coach yelling, yelling,

and waving me,
            or the thought of me,
      into the dugout.

Ekleksographia:
Wave Two

November, 2009

Poems

Rodger Moody

Rodger Moody is the founding editor of Silverfish Review Press. His poems and prose poems have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Caliban, Paragraph, upstreet, Indiana Review, Small Farmer's Journal, Eclipse, and online at Poets Against War. A chapbook, Unbending Intent, was published by 26 Books (Portland, Oregon, 1997). He has made his living as a warehouse worker for the last twenty-four years.