2 poems by featured poet Jonathan Moody

Our next off the page poetry series event will feature poets Winston Derden and Jonathan Moody on Wednesday, January 8 beginning at 7pm.  Open mic to follow featured readings. Refreshments provided.

The poems below are by poet Jonathan Moody.

Jonathan Moody received his MFA in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh and his BS in Psychology from Xavier University of Louisiana.  He’s also a Cave Canem alum whose poetry has appeared in African American Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, Gemini Magazine, good foot, Houston Poetry Fest Anthology 2013, Peter Doig: No Foreign Lands, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, storySouth, Tidal Basin Review, Xavier Review and is forthcoming in Illya’s Honey.  Moody has been a featured reader for Houston’s Public Poetry reading series.  In 2013, he earned a spot on Houston’s Word Around Town Poetry Tour lineup and was selected to be a “Juried Poet” for Houston Poetry Fest.  Moody is the author of The Doomy Poems (Six Gallery Press, 2012).  He lives in Fresno, Texas, and teaches Dual Credit English at Pearland High School.

THE PROCESS OF INTERPRETING POETRY

You immerse yourself in darkness

& expect your eyes to adjust

only to have your vision

become cloudier than it originally was. 

Because there are no walls, there’s no light switch.

Your breath is a flashlight powered

by the unreliable battery of anxiety. 

Roots rest across your feet.

Or are they frayed cable wires?

Slithering snakes? A corpse’s fingers? 

This uncertainty induces headaches, nausea,

& dizziness, but it’s this very uncertainty

that props your body in an upright position

& places the brown paper bag over your mouth. 

You tilt your head beneath

the poem’s title;

it’s a pipeline leaking water.

~Jonathan Moody

URBAN FRONTIER

(GAIA’S MARSHLAND EXHIBIT

AT RICE GALLERY) 

for Mary & Chuck Wemple 

In Houston, skyscrapers

are unmarked tombstones.

Incessant bird crap

driving the homogeneous

cattle herd to stampede

orange marshland. In their path

stands a diverse flock:

seagull, woodpecker, warbler.

Their collective credit

score doesn't soar, 

but the skyline co-signs 

their lease to start new business:

a boiled peanuts stand adjacent

to Ice Cold Slush. How many

years from now until the cattle

herd, with all its presidential 

bacon, drives up interest rates--

until the skyline & its cloudy

judgment invests all of its savings 

in a foreign exchange scam

& can no longer cover

the flocks' defaulted loan? 

Like the names of slain soldiers,

these indie establishments

will be commemorated on a mural 

only to be forgotten

& suddenly "discovered" 

so conspicuous consumer

livestock & their adopted

African cubs can peer 

through the hole 

in Nostalgia's screen door 

without having to use brooms

to shoo away diverse flocks.

~Jonathan Moody

Video poems by Jonathan Moody:
Gothic Barkley
Moody at FPL Off the Page Poetry from 8/4/2016