Kelly Moffett

Kelly Moffett is an Associate Professor at Northern Kentucky University. Her poems have been in journals such as Laurel Review, Rattle, Colorado Review, and Cincinnati Review. She has three collections of poetry and one chapbook and a new book coming out next year from Salmon Poetry.

Being

Honeysuckle grips the back wall in the coming light.
Silence carries with it all of the silence before.

I am what shows up.
Each day, I enter and take off my shoes.

In the field, deer gather what is possible.
The house holds me.

Sartre's "bad faith" means acting without authenticity.
I watch myself fill the coffee filter.

My nightgown clings as a bat wing to bone.
When I kiss you, I am a mask kissing you.

I don't understand more than that.

After He Left

The books had it right:

I floated in the largest lake
in the smallest town.

The fundamental stunned me:
the jar's shadow held in the wall.

A far-off light split the night into two.

I became another sort in the room.

Freud said flowers have no emotion.

(The coneflowers reminded me.)

The upsurge held.

Emptied me as a can, a rusted bell.

I smudged him from the saltshaker.

No hammer or sword stirred the air
like his breath.