Souvenir
David Antonio Moody
The summer I mowed for moving money.
Businesses
and homes with cement bird baths, green
with algae, paid the most.
Naturally I worked
every church circuit.
They wouldn’t tip well, couldn’t
say no, so I took it as good omen
while trimming sumac in a spare lot
to find an old polaroid, big family huddled
with balloons by a pool.
One day far off I will get
a phone call.
An ex proud to say she threw my shit
off the dock, that if I motherfucking want it
I can motherfucking swim.
And on that day I will,
but that is not today.
Dawn hasn’t moved in whatever
dawns bring, so there I am again tightening
a mulch blade.
The trimmers charge while I thumb
a landscape book.
Not that I want a mortgage
though perhaps someday.
Someday a yard pool,
a neighborhood with hedgerows, hedges
so wild.
I water them through the fence.
David Antonio Moody teaches creative writing and composition at Arizona State University. He is a docent at the Phoenix Art Museum and former production editor for The Cortland Review. His recent poetry appears in Juked, The Florida Review, and Watershed Review. David holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University where he performed feats of balance in the Jack Haskin Flying High Circus.