JARRETT MOSELEY is a bisexual poet living in Miami, where is a lecturer at the University of Miami. He is the author of the chapbook Gratitude List (Bull City Press, 2024). His poetry has won awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Baltimore Review, earned an honorable mention for the Miami Book Fair’s Emerging Writer Fellowship, and been long listed for the Poetry Society’s 2022 National Poetry Competition. His poems are featured or forthcoming in Ploughshares, POETRY Magazine, AGNI, Poets.org, Waxwing, Only Poems, Baltimore Review, Diode Poetry Journal, wildness, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere.
I gave up on images
being a way out of suffering.
A flower that we picked
from the pumpkin farm
down south, the sedan casting
long shadows from the roof
of a car dealership
beside the highway. The more
I hurt, the more each thing
became only itself.
And I became a person
living my life from the inside.
Seeing for the first time
the Noni tree you used to love
chopped into orange pieces
in the backyard, two ants
struggling in the chemical trap
we bought for your car
now placed in my doorway,
the Pothos leaves propagating
in glass jars on my desk
not as part of something larger
but as objects in a world full
of objects. I gave up on explanation
and gave in to pain.
From that small vantage
I stared into a plain blue sky
until the light opened up my head
and removed every last picture.
And in that void, a lake formed:
a water skier skidding across
its surface, hiding behind each tree
he passed for a moment.
Volume 15.1, winter 25
Jarrett Moseley
