Daniel Edward Moore, Winter 2017

The Origin of Trouble
Daniel Edward Moore

Memory can always be something more
if reality doesn’t stand a chance:
a hooker dressed up like a Franciscan nun
feeding bread to the pigeons and poor.

Going there daily in my habit of relief,
dragging the past like a rosary chain
used to pull truckers from ditches of despair,
from beds gone Arctic and wives gone AWOL.

Maybe this is the origin of trouble—
the table of contents in a book called you,
with a broken spine and missing pages
and too much ink on a stranger’s hands
with fingerprints matching your own.

Daniel Edward Moore is a recent Pushcart Prize nominee whose poems have appeared in American Literary Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, River Styx, Rattle, Western Humanities Review, Mid-American Review, and Assaracus. He has poems forthcoming in Prairie Winds Literary Journal, Riding Light, Badlands Literary Journal, Broad Street Magazine, Common Ground Review, Glint Literary Journal, Permafrost Magazine, Compose Literary Journal, and the Tule Review. He lives in Washington on Whidbey Island, where he is working on his first book of poems. (danieledwardmoore.com)