Ten Februaries ago, I buttoned my heart back into my sleeve.
I’ve always been good at closing doors to rooms I won’t enter again.
Today’s snow flies back up into the sky. A year is a unit of time.
Ten years is a unit of time, or ten units of time. I give my earring a little tug.
Fellini said, The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography. I, too, can fashion beauty
from discomfort, splendor from pain; a life’s work from grit stuck in my jaw.
Everything is possible to the one who’s designing the ship. My son
draws a white cat with a white crayon and says, See?
My flaw is in thinking I’m an island—untouchable—or a very small winter
forever headed elsewhere. My flaw is in thinking I can always change the ending.
—Jennifer Moore
Jennifer Moore (Twitter/X, Instagram, Website) was born and raised in Seattle. She is the author of Easy Does It (2021) and The Veronica Maneuver (2015), both from the University of Akron Press, and a chapbook of centos, Smaller Ghosts (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Bennington Review, DIAGRAM, Interim, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. An associate professor of creative writing at Ohio Northern University, she lives in Bowling Green, Ohio.