Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester
Your arm is reaching into the carpeted walkway,
where hundreds travel the gentle slope
toward the cold tile of the ground-floor lobby.
Your pink stomach winks through the rise
in your shirt, keeps watch as the crowd follows
in rippling curves to miss your hand, palm-up,
your fingers slightly curled as if tied off with five
loosely rigged strings anchored at your wrist, your body
run aground on a bank of sleep. It looks like
you recently let go of something hand-shaped, a bowl
to hold the food you cannot get down the corridor,
a ripe piece of citrus—the way sails hold the memory
of wind in their slack. I hope what you let go of
comes back—I hope you do not need it.
____
John Moessner is the author of Harmonia (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2023). He received his MFA from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is an editorial board member for Nimrod International Journal. You can find his poems in New Critique, New Letters, North American Review, and Poet Lore.