Category: Poetry

Scaling

~ Deb ~ Leave a comment 
I get emotional at the dentist. True,
core-level, uncontrollable emotion.  
Not at the standard cleaning, but
always with the deep cleans, the
 
scalings, where they start by putting
needles right into the soft wet 
skin at the tensest meeting of 
jaw muscles, the hinge behind
 
the molars. I anticipate this for days
and by the time I lean back in
the chair, my heart flutters and 
the internal child I put through grad
 
school in my therapy-rich twenties
comes home eight all over again. 
I joke to the hygienist that I may cry,
because making a direct joke about a 
 
deep fear is a defense mechanism I
never consciously developed, but 
developed nonetheless. She jokes 
back, well, if you cry, I’ll probably
 
start. And then she leans over me
with blue-gloved hands, a tiny mirror
in one and a syringe in the other, and 
says to relax and open wide. 
 
I almost don’t.  For a second, I consider
bolting upright and walking out. I’m
an adult.  I can do that. I can insist
that you take your hands out my mouth
 
today, Satan.  But I don’t. Instead,
I grip the armrests like I’m clinging 
to rock, hanging off a cliff, the strength 
of my hands the only intercessor
 
between me and certain death.  I close
my eyes and open my mouth. As I feel 
the brush of her latex glove against my
lip, a tear escapes my right eye,
 
slides an inch toward my ear and
stops, clinging to one invisible
hair or laugh line. It stays through
the entire procedure, like a
 
companion, like a sister holding my 
hand, like a focal point I can laser onto
instead of imagining what it looks like
to poke sharp steel beneath my gums 
 
and pressure wash tartar away from 
the soft pockets. Even writing this
now, when the numbness and soreness
and shots are all long past, I feel 
 
a warm wetness build up in my eye, the 
right one, and my companion lets me know 
she never left.  I don’t know what this old 
wound is that reopens periodontally. I imagine
 
a past life in which I was gagged, knotted
cloth jammed in my mouth, hands tied
behind me, as I’m walked to a firing squad,
helpless. Or maybe I was a prisoner of war
 
who had each tooth pulled as my
interrogators attempted to pry from me
information I didn’t have. Or maybe 
it’s from this life, times when I felt 
 
hushed, or the opposite, times I
found trouble when I refused 
to stay quiet. Or maybe it’s just 
that the soft wet skin at the 
 
tensest meeting of the jaw muscles
feels like what the heart must feel like,
soft and tough and reliable and so,
so vulnerable. And sliding a needle
 
into that place is precisely how feeling
is born, where the sharp meets 
the soft, where healing hinges 
to pain. 
 
© 2020 Deb Moore, All Rights Reserved

Cassandra

~ Deb ~ Leave a comment 
(A prophetess in Greek mythology cursed by Apollo 
to speak the truth but to never be believed.)

Words bombard the world 
in rapid fire 
every second. 
Another book about wizards, 
another poem about birds, 
tweets about Trump, 
status updates about dinner 
and cats 
and vacations, 
websites for anything you can think to Google.  

Godzilla porn.  
Why the Kardashians are famous.  
What a chair would look like if knees bent backwards.  

The things to read outnumber the readers. 
Still, writers write. 

In their lonely caves,
by monitor light, 
they fill terabytes of memory 
with the past and the future. 
They churn together experience and understanding 
until hardened into a vision worth writing down.  
And then they hope that someone 
is paying attention. 

But no one is, 
at least not at first. 
Journalists wrote about the Taliban before 9/11. 
Before Y2K, tech writers predicted 
a computer 
in our pockets 
more powerful than Apollo 11. 
A scientist published in 2019 
about a coming worldwide pandemic.  

No one listens until prophecies turn to floods.  
Still, writers write. 

They spew forth reams 
of poetry and prose
and essays 
and journal entries 
and investigative reports 
and sometimes just half-thoughts 
or a particularly interesting turn of phrase 
on a random Post-it note 
barely clinging to a wall for years 
until used or discarded, 
but playing on the mind of the writer 
in ways both certain 
and inscrutable. 

Half-thoughts that may never be read by another, 
but recorded anyway 
for naught but potential. 
Words newly discovered 
or characters formed in journals like pop-up books,
story lines and first-time rhymes scratched on a pad, 
then shaped in a computer, 
then offered to a first reader 
like an initial visit to a new therapist 
and waiting to hear 
whether to expand or contract, 
whether to improve or 
whether to shake the etch-a-sketch
until the lines are faint 
then wisps 
then gone, 
but if improved, 
then posted for the world to see
even if no one listens. 

Because the Post-It note held an idea that was true. 
Because the work holds the prediction of a world 
made by our own hands. 
Because when the flood comes, 
and floods always come,
words from dry land 
will be needed.  


© 2020 Deb Moore, All Rights Reserved 

Summer Volta

~ Deb ~ Leave a comment 
(For Gloria Johnson)

Dinner is done, and 
the dishes. Dog has eaten
and gone outside. I sit now
at my desk listening to 

classical music and trying 
to finish writing a quiz 
for American literature this
fall while the sun goes down. 

My phone dings with an
alert, which means I will pick 
it up, and I will get lost for 
20 minutes checking the 

socials, all because I forgot to
silence the damn thing, and so 
it is that right in the middle of
writing the third of four 

possible answers on a 
multiple choice question, I 
learn that a grad school mentor
is retiring, and I am suddenly

struck with a sadness so deep
that I forget to return to the 
question. Instead I sit in my room
while voices from the radio intone

Whitacre’s “Sleep,” which now
sounds like a dirge, and the 
music and the dusk mix with
my memories, and I can see 

the room and the desks, eager
master’s candidates in a 
circle discussing Kazin’s “A 
Walker in the City,” and I 

remember being your
student and how much you 
taught me with nary a
quiz. 

© 2020 Deb Moore, All Rights Reserved

Things I Shouldn’t

~ Deb ~ Leave a comment 
Sometimes I think things I shouldn’t, and
I wonder if I’m helping them come
true.  I’ve heard that our thoughts become
what the world looks like through

our eyes, and I believe that for the 
most part.  But what about the horror
writers?  Is Stephen King’s mind 
filled with terror?  Is he afraid?  Haunted

by his own imagination? Is the dystopia
we live in all Margaret Atwood’s fault
for imagining it in the first place? Where
is the line between holding our fear just

long enough to heal it and creating a world
we never wanted? I need to know, because
sometimes I think things I shouldn’t. Like when
I imagine what life would be like if you were

gone.  One day, we will say goodbye for the
last time, and chances are, we won’t even
know it.  When I get your text -- “Home. Thanks
for everything” -- only then do I realize that

my breathing has been shallow for eight 
hours while you’ve been on the road.
And I am able to forget again that one 
day we will have to say goodbye for

real. I am safe in my home and you in
yours, and I can imagine that we will
see each other at Christmas, like we 
have for half a century or more, and we 

can pretend that we always will have 
another Christmas or another visit and
I can forget that sometimes I think things
I shouldn’t. 


© 2020 Deb Moore, All Rights Reserved