February 2025
Bio Note: My newest poetry collection Amanda Chimera, winner of the Arthur Smith prize, comes out in January 2025 from Madville Publishing. My prior poetry books include Dear If, Orison Books 2022; Flicker, Dogfish Head Prize, 2016; The Book Of Snow, Cleveland State U Poetry Center, 1997. This poem comes from an unpublished collection called the Dead Girl Poems, inspired probably by the loss of a close friend, but morphed in some strange ways.
On Seeing a Photograph of a Winged Bike On Facebook
The bike in the photograph must be hers.
It halts on a ridge, lace wings rustling
with light, flexed as if to fly. She rides
whenever she can, when wishing thickens
her spirit legs almost into flesh, memory
muscles her arms, and the love of holding
a spoon, a book, graces her
again like hands. Then she can fly.
In motion, the wheels become what they are
meant to be––quicksilver, sheer––and she
rides the smoke of her wake in time. Behind her,
the hallucination of absence, ahead
the dreaming she is.
©2025 Mary B. Moore
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