Penelope Moffet
Penelope Moffet is a poet and part-time legal secretary who lives in Los Angeles. She is the author of two chapbooks, It Isn’t That They Mean to Kill You (Arroyo Seco Press, 2018) and Keeping Still (Dorland Mountain Arts, 1995). Her poems have been published in Gleam, One, Natural Bridge, Permafrost, Pearl, The Rise Up Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Verse-Virtual, The Missouri Review and other literary journals, as well as in several anthologies, including What Wildness Is This: Women Write about the Southwest (University of Texas Press, 2007) and Floored (Kingly Street Press, 2020).
Talking to Scrubjays
Jackrabbit
zigzags to a manzanita,
stops with his large ears up,
rises on his backlegs
for a better look,
leads on to where
I had not meant to go.
Off to the side
on an animal trail that
invents itself
as it goes along, skirting
foxtails and cholla,
the stiff outstretched
fingers of scrub oak,
a deer moves,
flank and back legs glimpsed
as I pass a hill-top
tumble of boulders,
ideal for a cougar den.
At dusk a rainbow
rises from mountains
against dark clouds, disappears,
returns more luminously,
calling rain into the last bit
of last bit of desert sunset.
Sheila-Na-Gig online 