The Looters
The leaves at the window have been looted
pocked with absences air holes eye holes,
we’ve eaten more spaces for the light
we’re never quite sated by
trees fields oceans orchards in bloom dandies
in suits. We cannot stop eating eye candy
my best royal blue jeans tightening
the noose on my waist your new shirt opening
little mouths at the placket while Fall’s
dry clear air crisps clarifies and spills
ripening apples, leaf piles,
bark: my chins wobble, we rock as we walk
nibbling oaks maples, we’d give our eye teeth
for dessert there’s peacocks.
A poet and retired professor, Mary Moore has a forthcoming chapbook, Eating the Light, selected by Allison Joseph as the winner of Sable Books 2016 contest, and have poems out this year in Birmingham Poetry Review (BPR), One, Cider Press Review, McNeese Review. Poems are forthcoming in Unsplendid, Canary, “Hoppenthaler’s Congeries” in Connotation Press, Still, and more. Other recent credits include Terrain (one of three finalists), Nimrod (as contest finalist, and as regular submission), The Moth, Drunken Boat, BPR, Cider Press Review’s Best of Volume 16, Unsplendid, One, and more. Besides earlier poems in Poetry, Field, New Letters, and others, Moore has a full-length book, The Book of Snow, published by Cleveland State University; two full-length manuscripts in circulation, Flicker, and Imbalance My Dance; and two chapbooks, Apostle-Thistle and Amanda Lynn.