Author: Rachel Moritz

Rachel Moritz is the author of two chapbooks, Night Sea (New Michigan Press, 2008) and The Winchester Monologues (New Michigan Press, 2005). Her poetry has been recently published or is forthcoming in American Letters and Commentary, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, 26, and typo. She is the recipient of a 2005 Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship and a 2008 Sase/Jerome Fellowship in poetry. She lives in Minneapolis, where she co-edits poetry for Konundrum Engine Literary Review.

Sumac & Little House

Sumac

 

Confetti tree, how you gladden our day 

Across the lawn it is
December, a wake  

blushed where flowers once hung 

illicit from the stems 


Now there is only this very dilate
sun, the almond-eyed clouds the child- 

head obviates through 

as rain, left
dangling 


As many remnants of sleep
fight possibly for us, 

coupling in absentia
No one to make but our ourselves 


And waves till witness where
there was none, 

only driftwood 


Indelicate measures     aloneness on the shoreline

owned by a manger of nothing tonguing
the skin around obvious fruit

Little House

1.   This way of being inside a parent’s necessity.
2.   Up at night, leaned on the whitewashed wall, several variations to pain.
3.   Not unlike our later episodes.
4.   I call the animation, growing down.
5.   As a great deal of wood goes loaded into a fireplace.
6.   Wildly hinged, a valley’s lean-to, vined by our bare boughs.
7.   This way of being inside fear is childhood.
8.   Anodyne conditioned on a gold basilica of air.
9.   The very act we responded to, locking our windows and doors.
10.   Not understanding how long the house requires of you.
11.   As a great deal of wood goes loaded into, sired.