Poem of the Week, by Jim Moore
On a moonless night a long time ago, just off the highway, I leaned against a cinder block wall with a payphone pressed to my ear. The only light came from passing cars and a bug-stained fluorescent bulb mounted above the phone. The voice on the other end was bored, disinterested. Across the miles I felt the connection diminishing, no, diminished, no, gone.
I ground my forehead against the wall and tried to sound un-desperate, un-despairing, un-lonely, un-everything I actually felt. At that moment something dropped onto my shoulder and then to the ground – a blob of white putty that turned into an albino frog that then dragged itself away into the weeds.
That frog and that night still come washing over me sometimes, the way they did when I read this poem.
True Enough, by Jim Moore
I have forgotten many things.
But I do remember
the bank of clover along the freeway
we were passing thirty years ago
when someone I loved made clear to me
it was over.
For more information about poet Jim Moore, please check out his website.
Yesterday I sat at the table all day and labored through every paragraph of every page of a forthcoming novel, trying for the many-eth time to get the timeline perfect, and then I got up this morning and did it again. If Micah disappears on Wednesday night and Sesame starts looking for him on Thursday morning and winter break is a week from Friday and the weekends don’t count then how many days will it take for blah blah blah blah blah. Scratch paper and pen to my right, calendar to my left, stuck in the middle with my own inadequacy. 
One of my daughters had a friend when she was little, a friend the rest of us couldn’t see. He had a strange name which we all loved. Sometimes we would check in on him. “He’s asleep,” was the most common answer. Sometimes “He’s visiting his grandma,” or even “He went away.” Once, disturbingly, “he died.”
Hiking the other day up a steep and narrow trail, my eyes kept searching for where I should step next. And then my feet kept setting themselves down exactly where I wanted them to be. I didn’t have to look at them; they knew what to do. But how? How does this body of mine know how to do all the things it just. . . does? Dance and run and knead dough and type and shuffle a deck of cards and tell me when I’m hungry or cold or full or tired? How do all those signals make their magic way from eyes to brain to nerves to muscle and bone? Even though I don’t play basketball I felt my own self moving to every line of this beautiful spin of a poem. My body, all our bodies, are wondrous. 
Before taking the city bus for the first time, I was scared. How much does it cost and what if you don’t have exact change and what are those green cards everyone else seems to be holding and oh crap what about that scanner thingie? Etcetera.
A few years ago, from my front porch, I watched an enormous, dark turtle labor its way across Emerson Avenue. It was winter. Snow and ice and slush. A giant turtle? 
On the surface there’s little in common between Lucille Clifton and me besides the fact that we both grew up in far upstate New York (which, as all upstaters know, is in fact a deep and powerful bond). But ever since I read The Lost Baby Poem in my early twenties, a poem that filled me with so much sorrow and pain and understanding that it felt as if I were somehow embedded in it, she has been a kindred spirit. 
This past week: the friends in a group discussion admitting they can barely ask what the honorarium is because it feels so selfish. The friend who wonders can I back out of this event in NYC because I just noticed there’s no travel reimbursement and I literally can’t afford it but I can’t stand to let anyone down. The friends who say they know it’s their own fault for feeling ashamed of their bodies and why can’t they just ignore all the ads for liposuction, juvaderm, lip filler, neck filler, breast augmentation, tummy tucks, and vaginal rejuvenation.
Alison McGhee 