This month's Moon Prize, the 122nd, goes to Michelle Laflamme-Childs's bold poem "Go West."



Go West

by Michelle Laflamme-Childs


1

She said, “my limbs
must go west—soul
too.” He said simply,
“ok.”


2

I had to box
up the blush
lusterware plates—saddened
to quiet
their glow
with cardboard
and stringy tape.

I dropped messy
tears on their
shards when the box
finally arrived.


3

There are two-
thousand ninety-six miles
between us in the futon
on the matted brown
carpet of our
new apartment.


4

He was standing
at the bus stop—awkward—
when a barrel slid out
the cracked window
and laid its eye
on him. Laughter
rang out as it rolled
away leaving only his
sense of safety shot.


5

You were drowning
in brown
and blue and
thought only the east
could dust
your cracks.

You couldn’t
wipe the moisture
from your hands.


6

The day the phone shattered
my history—you
accidentally shaved off
your beard. Nothing
made sense.


7

He hated her
short haircut—it
reminded him
of the expanses
of wheaten nothingness still
uprooting his deciduous trees.

Her head, a clearcut,
bristly and bleached, sucked
the moisture
from him.


8

Cursed by the pottery
shards they
picked up in the arroyo
on their rented land,
they moved
to the affordable bedroom community
to have a baby.


9

Remember
that Thanksgiving
we were in LA and—
Tom called to tell
us our dog died?


10

Suspended in charcoal
slumber, she nurses—filled
with milk
and honey, giving
and taking
both life
and death.


11

I drove slowly
along the tree-
lined road, the twisted
branches reaching
into my head to pull
out a way
to explain myself to
you.


12

After throwing the door
into its jamb so hard
that the rubber duckie
photo exploded
into a million yellow shards, she
hurled the basket of child’s hair-
ties onto the bricks screaming,
“find it, then, FIND IT!”


13

What I was trying
to tell you, amid the incessancy
of screeching
and laments crashing over
us from the backseat, was:

“I have lost the abstraction
of my own mortality.”

You said
            “You’re not old…”

You said
            “That’s dumb…”


14

The dryer is broken.
The door is broken.
The fascia board is broken.
The stucco is broken.
The windshield is broken.
The screen is broken.
The fireplace fan is broken.
The gate is broken.
The oven is broken.
The pergola is broken.
The shed is broken.
The sink is broken.


15

They taught
her patience.

They taught her
impatience.


16

The other day I saw:
    ·  Three official city vehicles with white crosses hanging from their review mirrors.
    ·  Uncle Sam standing on the corner of Llano and St. Mike’s wearing a black ski mask.
    ·  An aquiline tree carved like a woman clad in old tire treads.
    ·  An old couple sitting at a café intently ignoring each other.
    ·  A construction sign that read “Road Work Beings Ahead."


17
 
Shards of chatter land
in her ash toned hair and on her
table, while she nurses the now cold
latte. Two-thousand
ninety-six miles and almost 30
years have slowly poured her
back into herself.
An errant finger absently roams
the terrain of her
brow, feeling for words
that still don’t come
without a fight.


* * * * *

Michelle Laflamme-Childs is a poet, arts administrator, and radio personality from Santa Fe, NM. She holds a BA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and an MA from St. John’s College in Santa Fe. She hopes to one day finish her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas, El Paso.

Michelle’s small, compact poems tend to be personal though not confessional. She strives to play with language and image in a way that is highly specific to her own lived experience while still holding space for readers to find places they might be able to fit inside.