If I suggest a toy for you to play with,
close your eyes and choose from the chest.
Be the boy with the hoop, the girl with the yo-yo.
Your chosen treasure will ward off monotony.
Day's not a sieve; it's an altar. You have to sacrifice
the toys of your youth. Toy piano, toy poodle,
toy train. When building a fort, half the fun
comes from destroying your creation.
Rubber duck, paddle ball. With your toy camera, capture
the local girls standing on their heads. We call this game
estrangement; upside down, everything's made to seem odd.
Let the balloon go: it floats to the ground.
Let the infant clutch your finger, she'll hang on
'til she goes down. To grasp blindly is to love.
Everyone knows how the whistle works: purse your lips
and blow. Everyone knows the core of the balloon is air.
©
is the author of The Veronica Maneuver (forthcoming, The University of Akron Press), and What the Spigot Said (High5 Press). Poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Best New Poets, Columbia Poetry Review, Barrow Street and elsewhere, and criticism and reviews in Jacket2, Spoke Too Soon, and The Offending Adam. A native of the Seattle area, Jennifer is an assistant professor of creative writing at Ohio Northern University and lives in Defiance, Ohio.
We’ve published two more poems by Moore: “[A wolf carved a hole of a web]” and “[You are a pool of oil].”
