After Turning the Clocks Back

Jennifer Moxley

I rest my feet on the record crates,wrap my cold hands around warm tea.I listen to the radiator work to takethe chill from off the sleeping house.The frost-gray grass is still, and yetmy mind is crowded. I long forthe ill-definition of my youth,when I lay on warm park lawnbeneath a eucalyptus treeand failed to read far in a great book.Time was so slow and so thickmy word-sprung yearningrode its drifts until, overpoweredby hunger, I fell asleep in the sun.I did not know that I was happy.

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Jennifer Moxley’s most recent books are The Midnight Work (poems) and For the Good of All Do Not Destroy the Birds (essays), both from Flood Editions. She teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Maine.  

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The Midnight Work
Flood Editions
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Jennifer Moxley's The Midnight Work is a meditation on the fragility of memory and love in the increasingly mediated post-Covid world of polarized politics and climate change. Oscillating between the intimate and the expansive, Moxley addresses old friends, living and dead, in a series of epistles among more condensed lyric poems. Lacking the exhortation to contentment found in Horace, these poems nevertheless bend toward an Epicurean temperance and resilience amid folly, disappointment, and inevitable loss.

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