about the author
Daniel Moore’s poetry has been widely published in journals such as the American Literary Review, Western Humanities Review, Laurel Review, Cream City Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Rattle, River Styx, Phoebe, and others. He currently has work in the Flint Hills Review,
Steel Toe Review, and El Portal. He has work forthcoming in Paper Nautilus, Coe Review, Dewpoint, and Atticus Review. He lives in Washington on Whidbey Island, where he is working on his manuscript, “Waxing The Dents.”
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The Almost Everything Nothing Quite Is
Daniel Moore
Here, daybreak is a cardiac event,
a field being raped by a toothless tractor
shaming the plow with rust.
The almost everything nothing quite is.
Eagles try not to be so Goth
in their dive for the panting blur.
Beauty this bad is a troubled little thing,
a cryptic collision of do or die.
Promise to never allow me to soar
beyond the tips of my shoes.
Promise to hold me closer than that.
If I ever look like a sun-of-a-bitch,
a motherless planet drunk on the dark
that vanishes when she’s done, please
tether my wrists to the ground
and watch gravity burn its hands on
braided clouds of rope.
Death is traumatic. The living remain.
I usually know by the fourth cup of coffee,
by the time the poem sets fire to the page,
if dawn is a bleep on the black horizon
of who I’ll never become.
Hear that sound in the middle of the field?
There’s an old blind drummer sitting in my chest
beating the light out of me.