Neli Moody

Neli Moody is a second-year candidate for an M.F.A in Creative Writing at San Jose State University.She is in her second year as a Teaching Associate in English Composiiton. Her background is ecletic including dance, art, theater and music as well as poetry.

 

Indigenous People

The Earth seeks to embody itself, knife-edged mountains thrust
skyward, a reconfigured horizon, curved and cut up out of a deep
hearted planet, a warm blooded planet, light years beyond the cold
faces of moons.

There are times when the rivers bellow and storm and the molten
sighs rise from center, something wounded furies the clouds
to ashes and the seas roll and blaze, scorch dreams to cinders
as steam rises and villages tumble lintel over threshold into the sea..

But we have dwelt here a long time and our scent is on the willows,
our breath bubbles in the shallows, our dominion is reaffirmed
in the game roasting on the spit, the bones we cast into one giant heap.

Something between us cannot be explained, a wisdom the book-
learned would dismiss as insubstantial, inconsequential
ignorant of how the dissonance of their clumsy intercourse
with the watchful ones bruises our ears and thorncatches our hair.

We speak of our past in aeons of waxing and waning moons,
floods, droughts, seasons of locusts and shooting stars
deer shedding antlers, high and silent snows, sowing,
a tacit harvest.

 

Domestic Fairy Tales

One might as well cast out love with the eggshells
and coffee grounds down the disposal, decimate troll
under the sink crushing vows promises, orange peels
and spewing them out, unrecognizable into the void
of what is leftover, unloved.

Who would have thought this romantic girl,
hair a halo of chestnut, spirals and spirals and eyes
dark and hungry for some sort of affirmation, yet believing
still in the conversation of birds and the extraordinary

hearing of dogs, who would believe that she would come to sleep
with her hands closed, a pillow on either side as protection
from wandering princes, shills of souls, those serpents
of jagged silence who coil themselves next to the sweater boxes
under the bed?

Give me the apple, next to the cold plate
and drape my morning hair in wreathes of steam
whirling up from black brew, make for myself
a spell of poems, a garden where the breadbox
used to be.




My Mother’s Spells

My mother birthed to me a gift of spells,
meant, I think, to protect my baby heart.
Even though she knew they didn’t work,
hadn’t worked for her, she threw
incantations written on onion skins
into simmering soup pots and prayed
that I would live.

She carried these down the wooded hills
songs of my grandmother, my great-grandmother,
between the tissue pages of Bibles,
chapter and verse, the meek shall inherit
the earth, down to a clapboard shack
and West Virginia a heartache away.
Christ did not know everything.

And I survived, hidden in apple blossoms
organza pinafores, garlands of garnet leaves
and red wool jumpers, snow angels,
rabbits muffs, I survived the fall
from the basement bar, escaped
the iron furnace, but not

my mother’s sorrowing heart. I drank
her tears before I was born, lost babies,
baby souls who hung about the rocking
chair, silent infants, in christening clothes
seeking some blessing at her bosom,
my place.

Words spoken together, combs dropped
on the floor, umbrellas opened indoors, all
required rituals, salt over the shoulder,
pinkies linked together tight and snapped
apart, pennies in purses and turkey wishbones
over the kitchen lintel.

Her vanity, “Here’s My Heart” perfume,
the birthstone brooch, clip on glass earrings,
yellow pearls, a small lake of a mirror, leafed
in gold, pins and hairs we should have saved
before nothing could be done, before it was too late.

The wisdom of our mothers
is a wild violet in deep woods,
flourishing where the sun is
intermittent, an hour’s hike
from the marked path.

Spells—2



Today when we spoke at once,
my daughter and I, I said, “Wait,
we’re linking fingers” forgetting the
theoretical, the observed, believing
in my mother’s spells.