Retired movie nut living in Chattanooga, Tennessee with a wonderful wife, Kristen and pomchi baby, Sharma
Author: JONATHAN MOYA
When I Am Among the Trees (not after the poem by Mary Oliver)
When I roam the real forestgrumpy apple trees spit their spoiled rotten children on my shoulders knowing I will collect them and mash their cores into cider.Their leaves refuse to form shadows nor shade me, letting the sun scorch my …
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To Eat a Peach
As I exitthe world of green dinosaursfused from abandoned rusty automobiles and steaming in the sun,a child offered me a giant peachharvested from a Palisade treegrown in the valley’s katabatic winds. It tasted of harsh-sweet stolen pleasures,lust and greed and …
Always Previously Owned
After Adam died Eve designed a house of wooden ribs. 2 She created it to never burn down. 3 It was full of happy walls and bright colors that never faded. (The next owner painted them gray.) 4 The rainbow …
Homeric Simile
As when his son, a pensive animal lover,on his first hunt,had to face the doe in his scope,his first kill lined up for the taking,breath held firmly before trigger plunge,the forest circling, fear trembling his lips, doe moving from view, …
The Projection Room
If lucky I will die in a room of non-hospital green, on plump pillows, good linens, with good family and good friends,the ghosts of loves, the odoramaof nitrate seas, forests or mountains on walls.Room where well-cast dreams lived and died. …
The Dig
Blow the dust of history off our bones. In the excavated ribs of ancient sailing shipsfind the burial chambers of kings. Blow the dust of history off our bones.In the dig just below them, but just over the rubble of …
For My Unknown Anniversary
Every year I knowingly cross the unknown date that will complete my tombstone,the day last fires will turn ice and my deafness will make the silence my true and final friend- and I will cradle the earth that cuddles my …
The Forensic Cleaner
they took the body out but the blood/bloodstain stayed there. the investigation begins. that’s the police’s job. but after the death the cleaner cleans. he cleans up blood, pieces of bone, skin, maggots, flies everything that a …
Only God Knows Dove from Spoon, Man a Hawk from a Handsaw
“I am but mad North North west; when the wind is Southerly, I know a hawk, from a hand saw.” (Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2) Only God sees and knows dove from spoon, can feign the smoothness of heaven, …
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Dead Flowers in Small Arms
I did want to do it with dead flowers the pressings of leaving here— flowers made of truths held openly in front from a fallow field left to nettles, the broken pebbles hammered by a vengeful sun. I plucked it …
Knowledge
he knows the earth beyond all seeds the earth that is untroubled in the scorch of afternoon light the petals of the angry sun Read More "Knowledge"
Doves Always Return
On the white dry limbs of the sycamore, disrobing bark etiolated in spring flash, three doves roost. “Peace,” they coo to the desire of my heart to calm the violent world so like the Lord’s small ship in the …
Daylight Saving Time
The clocks leap forward and I fall back looking for you to return from dust blessedly at the stroke of two this night. ¡Despiértate! (Wake up!) Es muy muy tarde Madre Mia. (It’s very very late My Mother.) Gather yourself. …
The Great Tornado
She knows the winds in the circles of all that’s around her. The funnel is as twisted as the screaming man on the wall hanging in the serenity of white space, crosses and orbs flying up like …
Memory Jug
When I die fill my memory jug with things my mother loved. Leave out her tears, the shivering in the rain. That heart on the silver cross, keep it, the scrap she wrote my future name on, …
Flying into the Demilitarized Zone
The eagle brushstroked black talons to beak broke red blue in the white sky tiny scarlet prey fought and died in once soft grasp matron touch a child freely loved plumped fed and feathered in aerie tall safe high from …
Bronze Disease
Put two copper artifacts next to each other, and in time, they will turn green from the attraction. Bronze Disease is what the conservators call it. For them, corrosion is the enemy. But that is not true, as …
Never Call the Evil Whales Forth By Name
Never summon the evil whales forth lest they hunger for a salt’s murder or seek to ravage their ship. They cry out havoc, scream tempest to the ocean and sky so the illhveli hear not their name. Their …
Self Portrait
I walk from there to there to paint myself into black pixels, my shadow following obediently part of the hobbled sketch. I draw myself as a wobbly line, ill aligned and always misplaced near the horizon Above are …
My Google History
I search Google Sky and there is a night picture. Yellow dots top and bottom in fluttering butterfly waves: too many to count, small red and white dots: 20 per square inch, medium red and blue orbs: 10 per …
The World Is Louder than You
Everything louder than the earth spinning under you will make you doubt you are alive. Read More "The World Is Louder than You"
Icarus, She Flies
A daughter dies, and she is found, in the cerulean movements of birds. Not a hawk. Mother Sky says those are for boy’s souls. The father sees mockingbirds building a nest of pine twigs in the corner frieze of …
Not a Bird Song
The not not bird listens to its not not song in the not not tree near my not not door. And in its song it hears something not not grand compared to all the other not not birds …
Persimmons and Pomegranates
I. All through elementary school blonde beautiful lip reading teachers would try to correct my “th”s by snaking their tongues between their teeth and holding it there, ripe cherries tempting me to bite into them. This was the one …
Sentinels
The sentinels stand silently guarding the monuments from rioting against their shadows. One guard counts the sunshine, the other the dark. The piss and shit, the broken glass can never be really cleaned up. The stench just follows the tour …
Where Waldo Is Not
The greatest where’s Waldo paintings to be have him the tiniest spot at the very top in a population of near clones. After searching everywhere he will be the last thing you’ll find, the last thing you’ll see. …
Housekeeping
We birth a thousand destined broken things: chair legs detach from their seats under the weighted repetition of sitting cloth itself threadbare from the rubbing of muscle. We glue together the blue China fallen in grief. …
Steve Earle Sings His Son’s Songs
“Don’t make me bury you,” the elder spoke to the younger over the phone, knowing that his child had inherited all his demons. “I will support you if you want to do rehab,” he whispered, that old Harry Chapin …
A Gun and a Hotel Bible
No bad guy talks alone to a Bible in a hotel room with a gun in his hand. “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put …
The Star
It comes like He came on the longest, darkest night of the longest darkest year proclaiming all the glory of God and the beauty of planets and suns. The old gods have been exiled to the sky and their …
All Creatures Great and Small
For a week a blue fly buzzed around our apartment subsisting on our Pomchi’s water, kibble and kitchen counter crumbs and dodging attempts by my wife to swat it. I used to catch flies quite easily in my palm …
Wolfwalkers
The town exists in harsh geometry, the forest— a fiery flow. The wolf leaps above their soul, a crescent moon. Run the wolf. Flee the wolf. Don’t go beyond the wall lest you be devoured. When …
A Wedding Dress Story
She didn’t want this wedding dress to be a widow, alone, encased in plastic in the unused dark of the closet, moved after spring cleaning to the basement near the leaky window, after five years moth-balled to the old unopened …
Living All the Eclipses
As the moon dips behind Earth’s faint outer shadow in penumbral eclipse an imperceptible darkness seizes my soul in fear I wait futilely, like the ancients, for the next blood red cycle to engulf the world in ignorance and …
Going to the Sock Hop by Herself
She dances alone, the black child in the yellow dress. Alone amongst the black and white oxfords, the ivory Buster Browns, the brown penny loafers with smiling Abe Lincoln’s looking up to her from the confines of their …
Small Axe: Lovers Rock
The music is the scent in the air that changes everything. “I’ve got no time to lie, I’ve got no time to play your silly games,” it croons with a sweet she reggae lilt pairing off the lovers from the …
Identifying Features
My mother wanted me to go away. I hardly sent her anything. From behind, we all look alike. Read More "Identifying Features"
Thanksgiving for Two
Due to the pandemic the children are not coming. The adults will set a table for two and wait for the zoom chat after the game with the Dallas Cowboys and the Washington Football Team formerly known as the Redskins. …
Small Axe: Mangrove
All you wicked men what is wrong with you? There is no black Justice seen on the Sistine Chapel. Only the stupidities that can make a stuff bird laugh- the small axe ready to cut the …
Sitting With My Mother
In the early morning rise, my mother and I take a ride to the hospital where I was born and she has her dialysis treatments. Her feet, wrinkled and bruised, exhausted are raised on a leather pedestal. They …
Arcane Torso Mistakenly Posted to Pornhub
The steel bar that holds the torso up gives it a spine and makes it art and not some headless, armless, genital-less mutilation pushed from a machine going faster than the white signs allowed. I see it only on my …
Defining the Difficult Word Inside Her
I plea for my mother’s spirit to wait for me before the ascension because I want to know more beyond her sun, moon and stars; for her to show me the other colors hidden inside her; shades my crafted words …
Meghan Places a Poppy on John’s Grave
On the 11th month, the 11th day, at the 11th hour, Meghan wore her poppy on the right side at 11 O’clock, just like her father, John McCain taught her. Holding her newborn girl Liberty close to her— and taking …
Time Pieces
I. 1. The poem parses time into syllables and the syllables reach out to hold you in the embrace of your grandmother’s words, the light touch of motherly praise, the squirm of a daughter’s protestations, the first gurgling phonemes of …
Blue Shoe
The blue shoe on the side of the road had me wondering who it belonged to. Yes, shoes are made for journeying, poised for leaping not yet taken. They shine with this potential right off the factory line. …
Cairns and Crows
The cairns are mothered by murders of crows— four stones as black as raven eggs, others sky blue with specks of black, pointing this way to heaven, pointing this way to hell, or is it to …
Sea Church
Rising from the watery mist the grey sea church blesses the waves and prays to the sky, lonely, unadorned, a silver carven wing, folded in limbo, as its sea bells peel out the redemption of sand and stone. Its …
La Isla de Munecas: A Day of the Dead Poem
Orphaned from the girl who bought and loved them the dolls were packed tightly into a suitcase and floated gently down the canals of Xochimico to the Isla de Munecas and into the waiting embrace of Don Julian Santana Barrera. …
Piano Fade
The piano player has already been shot. He is no longer a musician, less one that sold-out halls. Once he turned the river’s chant into a jazz so fine that fish weeped. Now, he plays only right-handed …
Breaking Horsepower
The black stallion runs onto the tracks headlong into the train’s cycloptic light attempting to break its horsepower. He refuses to yield to gravity touching his feet and grounding him into mammal again: sweat, hair, lungfuls of air, …
Clutter
It soothes me to keep the clutter of the past in picture albums on my cell phone: mother’s yellow dresses, ashes in weighted urns, brittle birth and death certificates, enough heirlooms to make a portable history, things heavy enough to …
The Cursed Land
Long the land watches for death or harvest amongst the lulling black mounds a slumber in piles, huddled so neatly without blankets from the shivering wind blowing meanly under the sway of the killing night’s climb. Underneath are all …
The Great Horned Night Owl Screeches My Name
The Great Horned Night Owl screeches my name and I whisper back that it’s wrong. Look around the block, across the coast there is the soul that you seek. She shifts to the closest oak limb tapping just …
Drownings
It’s easy for them to slip into the ice, the big crack of nonjudgmental water, absorbed entirely in the joy of now. First winter blankets them, then the frost, the quiet, until the last of their woolens, the black …
The Blue Lurch of Train in Time
Time flies by in the animated flashes between the silver frames of the train’s windows, moving as fast as each perceived thought, a time machine rattling between future-past: egg sandwiches downed with blue electrolytes, rustling newsprint coexisting with touch phones, …
Black Pieta
Strange fruit lives in the bones of black mothers, the blood of their sons, marrow of their daughters. Blue winds drift by full of poplar scents, aromas that never leave the maternal soul. They exhort their …
Living in the Mermaid’s Shadow
I watch my love, almost a mermaid, standing in the kiss of shoreline and ocean, washing sand from her glistening form. In the pause between tides I tie a hope line, strong as my inglorious life, to her toe. …
Heartbreak (poem)
Losing a child never known a mother known love found love lost memories remembered memories not remembered old man’s tears grief in womanly rags heartbreak Read More "Heartbreak (poem)"
Orphans
1. The motherless-fatherless God orphans the world in His own image, His experience, His own elevated thoughts. Yet He is unsatisfied, unhappy for His creation is not perfect enough. Even the little man with His breath-spark is …
Moths
Luna moths flutter in the captive night light of early December, strong, determined to mate their way to the electric crackle (invisible as a secret trapped in the soul) emitting from the machine in the eaves. Their disintegration illuminates …
Paper
There is a certain satisfaction that comes with shrinking language and imagination to a rectangle, fitting black-and-white words into a prescribed length and width given human depth through inscription. The filled sheet of paper almost transcends its smoothness …
River Ode
The lavender skin river whispered with a maiden’s call. Bonnet curls kissed her banks in a flush of forgiving tears for the trawlers bruising her mercy and calm, each departing an oily scar that dispersed in the flow, …
Casting
1. If there is wild moving water there is a trout in it waiting for the cast, the whip of line in air splashing a weigthless fly on the mirror surface luring the rainbow fish …
The Yellow Bus Stop
The earth is black on both sides. The yellow bus taking the living away passes pile after pile of rubble, of signs that were once there: the Harley Davidson store, The Rogue Action Center- a nonprofit climate change group, …
The Dead Mother’s Children Kneeling in Love
White and red roses defend the mother’s coffin: cherry stained, her interlocked hands in prayer draped in veil gauze, her gold dress the same she married in, as the procession of her children grieves in a black and white …
Memory Monster
The memory monster haunted Mavette on the platform, the gym, pass the graveyard, scolding her for leaving the tiniest remains of food on her plate, scourged her for reading that dirty Jew, Levi. The swastikas chased her in her …
Pareiodolia
The sand holds our faces. Every thousand grains forms a man, a woman, a child. Every millionth there is your mother- young, stunning, beauty mark perfectly spotted on right cheek. Every billionth adds a little weight, gray, …
Plum Juice Runs Happy
You worked hard for the plum, to bite into the Mariposa before the heat comes and it rots. Its purple plumpness pulsates with juice, so dark and clear through and through. The comfort is not startling. It’s the …
The Blue Fish
I watched in the swirl, the blue fish paddle steadily away from the boat, knowing that it had been hooked before, the wound protruding wormlike from his jaw. Today would not be his last fight. He would not be …
Take a Stand
https://twitter.com/i/status/1304186433054420992 With the start of NFL football yesterday, I must salute those brave and patriotic players and teams who take a stand against police brutality of black people. I must share this poem and video that my Miami Dolphins posted …
Smashing Glass
Smash the glass if you must, yet do it gently using soft hammers. Catch the fury in your breath and release its image on the pane. The goal is not destruction but creation, to leave behind something cracked yet still …
Abandoned Boat
The Little Bessy molts its white chipped, dull letters out to waves it cannot use. Capsized on the rocky Maine beach, where it once fished for lobster in richer anchors, the peapod displays its tattered nets on its hull …
The Chair and the Light Pulsing on Its Rails
Abandoned in the middle of the blasted field, its arms shredded, legs battered, the chair exists in broken splendor catching the best of the speckled light dancing in the quivering shadows. Lines of the seated father stain the backrest, motherly …
Living With a Rusty Christ
The clean church Christ hangs on rusty nails, dozen-fold years denied a resurrection, tied to everlasting pain and death, heaven denied, mortal redemption denied because the flesh, existing between hope and despair, refuses the soul’s release. The congregation is …
The Driver
The bus driver sees people as they really are: survivors & corpses going for regular treatment, shadows & lights moving in a tunnel, loved & loveless reflections in a rear view mirror, like him, the sufferers of whole-body vibrations of …
Window Swap
Let me swap your window view with mine. Better yet, let me open a new window anywhere in the world: Swap my clouds with the widow Lotta that delights in the sight of six boys skipping on the edge …
Growing the Forest
When your mother dies you grieve, vow to change, say a prayer, plant a memory tree. When your father dies you swallow hard, set yourself square, curse all his mistakes, and seed an oak. When your brother/sister dies …
Touch
Lovers dream of cuddling, laying flat under the sky, hand to chin, chin to wrist, eyes never opening to harsh light, feet caressing toes among the daisies sway. In the past they loved erect, pulling close in multicolor hugs, …
The Cursing Stones
Ariana, adopted the old Greek ways, when Nikos died diving for sponges. She encased her curses into two lead stones: smuggling one into his coffin, dropping the other into Naxos deepest well. She made sure Nikos soul would carry her …
Pieta
Perfection can only be seen in the descent, the glow of spotlights colliding to true whiteness, the realization that grief touches the ground. Mary, they say, you never experienced birth pains, but the linen folded eternally beneath your son …
The Red Bicycle
(In homage to William Carlos William) Outside was my red bicycle leaning against the wall next to a red wheelbarrow on which nothing depended on. I was the kind of child who was always daydreaming himself to victory …
Van Gogh Paints His Final Vision
It was the light that told Vincent, the one which always told him the truth, reflected his soul’s desire, the glistenings of his mind, that this mass of gnarled roots would be his last vision. He could feel …
Washing the Corpses
--After Rainier Maria Rilke The washers have lived with death as they have with the lamp, the flame and the dark, the nameless rinsing of limbs, the even more unnameable nameless. without histories relative to them. Their sponges …
Soft Body Memories of Our Grief
We exist in unkeepable bodies and in the bending over we decompose for we are are but the memory of grief that soft bodies leave when they die. Read More "Soft Body Memories of Our Grief"
After the Sun Has Gone
Oh, when the sun yields child to the soft caress of the night After the sun has gone. After the sun has gone. That lifts the wind after the sun has gone. The last of wonder and …
The Boy Who Dances in the Light
Shout into the eyes of sunlight of the boy who dances in the light. Every dragon’s death foretells this child onto even the smallest realm. The Phoenix is an ally to the boy who forges worlds. The …
Rainy Weather Laughter
The rain chuckles on the rooftop and the sound carry’s down the house. The oaks in their amber raincoats hiss in the water’s tickle. Their sinuses suckle the drops to veins then shiver off the excess. The …
The Whale
We turned around and she was there stranded between shore and sea, beach filled with the oily smell of whale, her dark tonnage serenading the waves for the comforting echoes of others, her great fins offering sand flowers to the …
A Very Hot Afternoon
The heat is a pendejo querida a street full of melda de vaca, mi amor steaming, stinking, like a hungry puta who takes mi dinero and gives me crabs. Sleep with me chica. Cool me down in el rio de …
The Art of Dying
The Pandemic has closed the theaters and cinemas. On stage a lone actor commits suicide in the loneliness. On screen the two lovers run to each other against the march of soldiers. The actor’s death is an …
Dr. Faustus Thanks the Devil and the Word
The poem rumbles in my brain and wakes me at three in the morning as if my devil branded me with his pitchfork reminding me of our inspired bargain My nemesis love calls me to the fiery sheet his …
Beyond the Dying Cloud
When a cloud dies doves and eagles dip their wings in mournful ‘memberance. When the sky dies it rots black in despairing soot of ash and pain. When the moon dies it’s mourned by the elliptical kisses of …
Painfully Clear
I tried to bargain away all the sickness and death in my life with the skies and mountains. They refused to disperse my pain in the sunlight and clouds. The void rejected my life, eternity denied my love. The moon …
On this Acre of Unspoiled Comfort
On this acre of unspoiled comfort the hard winds blow once again now. Through this acre of unspoiled comfort the house falls once again now. This acre of unspoiled comfort so unlike a broken cry. This acre of unspoiled comfort …
The Weight of Words
A woman’s beauty is light on the eyes, best pinned in thoughts, not weighed down by beautiful lines that cannot halt wrinkles. The dying frost of dawn does not feel sorry for the gravity of the nest knowing the …
How to Read a Difficult Poem
Keep the things you don’t understand always near you- in your pocket or wallet- so in idle moments at the bus stop or in line at the post office at the bookstore or coffeehouse you’re thinking until the inkling of …
The Other Blessing Before the Curse
Before audaciously flying in the strangled gleaming of the last glory of extinct clouds rising I asked my soul what is the purpose of having the last thought of mankind or any dreams Oh Jinn give back the last of …
Shutting Down
If I shut the border, no one will shut their window, hide in their closet, lock their door. They would shake the blinds of moths, bring the dog in from the doghouse, let the cat feast after the mouse …
Do Not Silence My Words That You Hear
Don’t take away my words by not repeating my poems inside. My poetry is revolutionary as a floating feather. Close your eyes and catch it knowing the vision is in its flight and not where it falls. Pick it up …