Emily Mosley
Emily Mosley’s poetry and essays have been published by Just Place, Weasel Press, Lucky Jefferson, Georgia EMC Magazine, and the books Psychedelic Trips for the Mind by Paul Krassner and Anthology of Poetry 1999 Teacher’s Selection.
my mother’s garden
honey bees float
suspended
in the thick lavender air
clouds of dust and
deliberate waterfalls from her grass-hued garden hose
form rainbows,
fracture time
and space,
changing up my battle plan—
hazed sunlight gilds, honeys
garden bricks
bricked walls slicked
with faint mexican radio
and the spiny branches of
something that’s got to be in the magnolia family
that twist skyward—
hummingbirds, gemstone-hued,
dart
ill-tempered and beautiful,
swerving past
blooms,
blush-colored
spiked saucers
heavy
on limbs,
tangled with
lilliputian piñata parts,
the arms of stars,
triangle-shaped,
primary colors
like party hats
at a child’s birthday
tiny trailing streamers
blown by a breeze that is now
made from the energy that
was once my mother
The End of the World
Rumor is
there’s a man who lives in
the abandoned naval complex
just down the street from my apartment building;
empty since Katrina
it straddles the land between
the Mississippi & the
Industrial Canal &
I’ve heard that he’s a vet,
maybe Vietnam or
Desert Storm & that
he’s
a kind of mayoral figure
respected by the other travelers &
people without homes
who make the complex their home,
living in the abandoned offices
graffitied gas station
overgrown basketball courts,
a dystopian paradise
set to smooth jazz wafting on the wind
from the wine bar across the street
all the broken domain of one of Uncle Sam’s sons
in the city
that care forgot
Two giant
Naval reserve ships
dock permanently on the
Mississippi side
standing (floating) watch,
still skeleton-staffed,
&
along the Industrial Canal there’s
a gravel path where people jog & walk dogs &
watch the barges slide
down the canal,
willows in shaded clusters at the very
tip of land
affectionately called The End of the World,
ending in a witch’s fingernail of jagged rocks
&
if you use the right bait you
can pull giant burpy whiskered catfish
from the muddy belly of the canal
the old crotchety men of the river
having traveled from Lake Pontchartrain
down the canal
only to have their time wasted by some dumb human
just before they made the river
& the smell
of them roasting
over an open fire in
a darkening parking lot cloaked in overgrowth
sizzles across the street
to that wine bar
making hipster bellies pirouette
& somewhere
a train whistles
echoing off the Mississippi
Sheila-Na-Gig online 