MOON IN THE HAYLOFT
by Rich Ives
1. In the kingdom of the barn, below the cautionary woods, imagined falling talon and claw inside the rumbling stomachs of gatherers, each movement in its hidden nest, abandoned, fragile in its vigil, contemplated, not quite circular, like the egg, still waiting for something to fall out. 2. There’s a voice in the well that has no feet. We ate quietly and raised the darkness to our lips. I used them both to wash out the bucket that held me. When you allowed it to breathe, the waitress brought me a glass with a tall and handsome waterfall in it. It’s what you might forget if you observed me from the hillside behind the barn’s prison. It’s the way memory releases when there is nothing more and the brain’s furrowed attention seems to lift from its stem.
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Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission, and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation, and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Dublin Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily, and many more. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. In 2011 he received a nomination for The Best of the Web and two nominations for both the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net. He is the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. His book, Tunneling to the Moon: A Psychological Gardener’s Book of Days, is currently being serialized with a work per day appearing for all of 2013 at silencedpress.com