Current
Issue
Volume 12.2
Jennifer Moore
—
Every Room Has a Temperature
An icicle is a line of thinking.
One solid point, down to a thaw.
Morning puts its voices on.
A sentence stripped of meaning floats along, alone.
The battle’s ongoing: fox in winter, owl in summer.
The war, always about to commence.
Once you said, Can someone else
do the listening for once?
A need to punctuate the statement. That’s where the emotion lies.
More often than not, I do what I should.
Folded jacket, boiled wool.
Is that bulb a soft or a bright white?
Making a game of it, an inventory
of every kind of water: running and boiling,
fire and ice, river,
reservoir, rose.
I daydream you’re burying your face in my breasts.
Like sending a valentine to a vulture:
please, eat my heart out in an empty sky.
You count every drip from the thaw.
The point of the pointless
is to allow room for.
Jennifer Moore was born and raised in Seattle. She is the author of The Veronica Maneuver (2015) and Easy Does It (2021), both from the University of Akron Press, and a chapbook of centos, Smaller Ghosts (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Bennington Review, Ploughshares, 32 Poems, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She is a professor of creative writing at Ohio Northern University and lives in Bowling Green, Ohio.
