by Jarrett Moseley
The last night we spoke, you said we could make this work.
I sold the bed we used to sleep on, to forget, hoping it would work.
I left the pink book you gave me on my desk, your letters
in my drawer, the ones where you said love is work.
I left the memory of us sleeping on a cliffside in my head
but deleted the picture we took, dead-eyed from waking up to work
at 5 AM on another coast, the night sea barely visible beyond your head
laid against my thigh, sprawled black hair, it was easy work
to be in love with you, but it was impossible to love you
in a way you felt. We were two felled trees attached by thin string, trying to work
gravity against itself. In a Key Largo parking lot, years ago, before we ever fell
through each other, your hand brushed against mine. We worked
so hard to be that simple again. B, forgive me. I would have
given myself away (I did) just to make it work.
Jarrett Moseley is a bisexual poet living in Miami, where he was a James A. Michener fellow in the University of Miami’s MFA program. He is the author of the chapbook Gratitude List (Bull City Press, 2024), and his full length manuscript Rehumanization Litany was an honorable mention for the Vanderbilt University Literary Prize. His poetry has won awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Baltimore Review, earned an honorable mention for the Miami Book Fair’s Emerging Writer Fellowship, and been long listed for the Poetry Society’s 2022 National Poetry Competition. His poems are featured in Ploughshares, POETRY Magazine, AGNI, Poets.org, and elsewhere.