Rita Moe: Two Poems

The Virgin Mary Contemplates a Career Change | Pantoum With Lines of Leslie Scalapino

The Virgin Mary Contemplates a Career Change

Something physical, out-of-doors,
say, a riveter on a skyscraper.
Heft of tools,
satisfying buzz of bolts
joining steel to steel.
Buttressing armor of denim,
breeze on bare neck.
At noon, lunch astride an I-beam
36 stories up, feet swinging
in rubber soled boots.
And at the end of the day,
descending
in elevator cage
through the skeleton of
the shrine they are building
and, with the rest of the crew,
walking away.

Pantoum With Lines of Leslie Scalapino

Soldiers functioning as reality. And calm
becomes a necessary artifact
of landscape. In the face of the seamless
can hunger be stanched?

Becoming a necessary artifact
is the terrain of the ambitious.
Can hunger be stanched
for the poor? Bewildered soldiers

guard the terrain of the ambitious.
Who addresses the hunger
of the poor, bewildered soldiers?
Landscape implies

an address. Hunger
presses against the boundaries
that landscape implies.
The news is at the mercy

of the presses. Against the boundaries
of belief, the poor hunger
for news of mercy.
The ambitious carve the landscape

with beliefs. The poor hunger
for an end to the silence
on the ambitious carving of the landscape
into territories that require defending.

There is no end to the silence
of soldiers functioning as reality and calm
in territories that require defending.
Landscape is the face of the seamless.

Poet's Biography:

Rita Moe received her MFA from Hamline University. Her poetry has been published in Water~Stone, North Stone Review, Sing, Heavenly Muse!, ArtWord Quarterly, Poet Lore, Diagram, Sidewalks, and other literary journals. She works full time for an investment management firm in Minneapolis and lives with her husband in Roseville, MN.