Nik Moore
Nik Moore is Kentucky poet and an alum of the MFA program at the University of Montana. Their work has appeared in or is forthcoming from GASHER, Poetry Northwest, A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia, and elsewhere.




​Synonyms for Return

I appeared under the mountain 
and asked for another mountain— 

these naked slopes wouldn’t hold 
the way I wanted to

be held. 

I’d been split, smoothed
over and pressed together again, 

fleshy mirror of oak’s swell, 
deciduous deviant. 

For work, I became delirious 
with distance. Counting the hours 

of one's effort is a labor itself—
three as I flayed my own chest 
and bared it upward, 

four as the turkey vultures hovered 
my canopy in wait.  

I was always open to this—

        a hangnail proffered 
        for nervous chewing, 

        a hunger for decades of banal routes 
        between home and earning, 

        a desire to die the same way 
        my folks always die—

and it caught up. 

Repetition marched into my blood
and made real the creases 
of my father’s face onto mine.

I asked for a mountain 
that could be honest about poverty.

I asked for a mountain 
that melted butter into its seams,

dug Newport butts from the Country Crock 
tub full of sand and lit them 

as a way of making 
some perceived fate real.

I returned home and made scavenger of myself. 
An older sister stitched my chest closed, 

rubbed me with salve, 
bound me in quilt.

With no promise of return
the dog left the yard. 

Lighting a fire, I asked the leaves 
to make cases for themselves. 

They all said the same things 
and none of them were true. 

The truth: 

        we will continue staying and dying 
        in our burdensome houses. We will leave 
        just to be treed again, corralled by shepherds

       or lured by great blocks of salt 
       and the boggy scent of home. 

       We will love on each other, smooth
       wrinkles from the hands of our dead, 
       carve a rough notch and keep on. 

My point is that the family came together 
to build my sister’s fence. It moved her to tears. 

The horses found their way
out again. Hunger brought them home.





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