Jarrett Moseley
Contest - Prose Poem
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 recipient of the 2022 Alfred Boas Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an honorable mention for the Miami Book Fair’s Emerging Writer Fellowship, and was long listed for the Poetry Society’s 2022 National Poetry Competition. His poems are featured or forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Poets.org, poetry.onl, and elsewhere.
A Possible Exit
Mary massages the scar bisecting my left wrist. We walk to the river and watch the salmon turn the water into a glass door painted over with blood. Mary says death is like a door: when someone you know decides to leave, it swings open. She says the first time she tried was like stepping into a lake with no bottom. For me it felt like snow. The salmon quiet down, it gets dark, we pack up. We go to the grocery store to buy dinner and laugh at the names of knockoff cereal brands. Mary holds soup cans up to the light, as if checking for authenticity. I chuckle from thirty feet away, to keep from crying. I don’t know how to tell her—whenever I write her into a poem, people think she’s dying. They have it reversed.
“ This poem is part of a greater series of prose poems from my manuscript that follows a group of friends in recovery from drugs and alcohol. After another of these poems was published, someone asked ‘Is she dying’ of Mary. She wasn’t—but I wrote that poem shortly after a high school friend of mine had died from an overdose, so I was thinking about death. Realizing those thoughts probably seeped into that other poem, I began thinking of all the times I’ve lost someone; how those losses colored everything around me, how they made death feel more possible—and at my lowest points, more of an option. This poem came from those experiences. ”