Thrush Poetry Journal
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Kelly Cressio-Moeller
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                                                    Self-Portrait as Empty Reliquary
 
                                              Let me sit here for ever with bare things ~ Virginia Woolf
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                              no saint has ever lived here
 

                                                                        the ultrasound: myomas dine by an open fire
 

                              body-truthing the bog: dead leaves & asphodel, the strangest fruit, the
                              never-born


                                                              thumb-worn rosary — beads now stick in my teeth

 
                              is barren ground any less sacred?
 

                                     silver-leaf my insides, place a candle in my hollow, follow, fallow
 

                                                             even broken glass refracts light
 

                                                                                            suture — specter — sepulcher

 
                              but look what you have made in fall’s gold air — hectares plowed,
                              harrowed, hallowed
 

                                                                                         stone webs of scar-tissue tracery
 

                              without my cervix, I am no less queen
 

                                                                                 open me, see there’s nothing left to give
 

                              to no longer smell of blood
 
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                                                                                                       no saint will ever live here





Kelly Cressio-Moeller has new work forthcoming in the Hermeneutic Chaos Press anthology, “The Sonnets”,Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. Previous publications include Boxcar Poetry Review, burntdistrict, Crab Orchard Review, Gargoyle, Southern Humanities Review, THRUSH Poetry Journal, and ZYZZYVA among others. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net. She is an Associate Editor at Glass Lyre Press. Visit her website at www.kellycressiomoeller.com




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