Trevor Moffa | Always, hopefully, soon

Always, hopefully, soon. Poems by Trevor Moffa, selected by Ron Mohring as Number One in Volume Twelve of our Summer Kitchen Chapbook Series.

Release date:  July 13, 2024 [49 copies]
21 pages
$12.00

Cover: vintage marbled end papers. 

Trevor Moffa is a poet and former coal miner, park ranger, book seller, and sandwich artist from Pittsburgh, PA. He has been named a Spring 2024 City Books Writer-in-Residence, and his poems earned an Honorable Mention in Nimrod’s 2020 Francine Ringold Award for New Writers. Recent work is published in outlets like Chautauqua, Sleet, Sierra Nevada Review, Midway Journal, and Under a Warm Green Linden.

To wherever cut grass goes

There’s a shine off long grass
cut grass lacks, long enough
to twist and bend sunward,
to bounce light from every edge
of every blade, lost
in the drying cover of clippings,
each lined lawn a light out,
a ghost of mirrors and motion.
 
Weeds, waxy weeds, in needed
shades and textures, bared
to hollow stems, to begin
again, beneath the equalizing blade,
sharpened, lowered, rotating,
advancing on anything
tall enough to sway,

to hide the lives of mice,
the fallen seeds,
the infinite bugs
on infinite blades
overgrowing, undefining
the property lines,

greening fence feet,
and shooting for the open
diamonds in the chain link
horizon, outside the orbit
of the seasoned blade.

The cut grass left to sun-cure
to dull straw and scatter,
each lonely blade memory blown
from something whole and bright,

lustrous and home, surrendered
to the agency of the wind,
to wherever cut grass goes.

[ Our thanks to Roanoke Review for first publishing this poem.]
  • Limited edition: only 24 copies are available. Order yours here.
  • Thank you for supporting this poet!