Jessica Poli

To My Second Lover

Now the last things we said are like the moon
on the night we said them: shadow-bound, absent.
An egg tucked in a black cloak, or a form of hunger.
And that moon is like a single rundown house
underneath it: porch bowed and sinking, ill-lit, stale.
Or the handful of straw that I stuffed in your mouth
in my dream last night: dry and tasting of moondust.
And as for the hay rake on the back of the tractor
making neat piles of gold in rows across the field—
that rake and field are like the swelling in my chest
when you called me for the last time and told me,
or might as well have, that the straw in the barn
had been soaked by rain, that out of your mouth, now,
would only come buckets of water instead of moonlight.

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Jessica Poli is the author of four chapbooks, most recently Canyons (BatCat Press, 2018) and co-editor of the collection More in Time: A Tribute to Ted Kooser (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Southern Indiana Review, The Adroit Journal and Redivider, among others. She is a PhD student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, founder and editor of Birdfeast and Assistant Poetry Editor of Prairie Schooner.