JONATHAN JACOB MOORE

Ars Poetica, Age 4

On the first day of preschool I am drawn
to the same question. Even then I floated
everywhere/ a peanut-colored pint of questions
& answers/ noiseless save for the asthma. I subsisted on stolen
awe. I felt the fear in others rise louder than my lungs as I revealed what I knew.

While other kids ran towards the kitchenette & race track
I walked straight to the globe in the corner of the room.

Intent & already afraid— full of childish vim & dead people's dreams/ still
strangers. My mama tells this story whenever I call home & get quiet towards the end—
after the routine updates we freefall/ into each other my fear enough for the both of us but
she's slain much worse. My three-year-old hand, she says, caressed that plastic
World & beheld its cerulean spinning:

"If nobody can live here,
Why does it exist?"

Flora & Fauna

I remember how fresh/
the red & brown scorpion
orchids inhaling my neck--
aroused by the lingering aroma/
apocalyptic. Something familiar.
Foxgloves begging to be pollinated
raw.

Can you blame me for wanting
every garden
to burn? For wanting
the gazanias & roses to bloom
on my side of becoming—
for the world to wear
this color of birth?

To be Black Pansy/ to be
              Black Hellebore
hivemind
              then
was to kill anyone
presumptuous enough
to pluck & pot & watch us
make their property
a home. Watch us make a home
out of the other owned until garden
variety gone/ until          pesticide parade.

Yes, to watch     was to wound.
Yes, to desire     in the past
I think/ was to speak of flowers
tearing apart human limbs &
burying them in our gaudy backyards.

Self-Portrait as Newly Discovered Galaxy Lacking Dark Matter

i strut stellar scandal in plain sight
of these benighted children/ my
cosmic sloppy seconds crashed
themselves to death & coughed up
such insignificant specks.

i am as massive as any other
body but translucent almost
invisible to their technologies
altogether save for measurements
of gravity i take up as much
space as the next/ but differ in
what i take with me/ all my light
is a trick of the dark my dark has
run its course/ or was it never there to
begin with what if life beings with dark
matter if it is the ghost in the
machine of every world
but me am I then all machine?
reverse engineering inception
& finding myself at the center
of every equation.

the beauty of being a rule
comes in breaking yourself/ &
they now confess
there may be more
than one way to form
a galaxy after all but
how/
to bind bodies
of gas & dust
if not the dark?

The poetry of Jonathan Jacob Moore, or Jon Jon, has appeared in The Poetry Project, The Ploughshares Blog, The James Franco Review, Vinyl, Winter Tangerine and elsewhere. Jon Jon is Book Reviewer at the Shade Journal, Fellowship Director at Winter Tangerine, and an African American Studies Ph.D. student at University of California, Berkeley. He's from Detroit and lives in Oakland, CA.