Julie L. Moore

Devil’s Backbone

Julie L. Moore

America! America! God mend thine every flaw. ~ Katherine Lee Bates

Driving along the devil’s backbone, I’m running late this October morning, as the country road’s hills & dips send my stomach rising & falling like an empire— oh, okay, no, not that sensational, but still the news on the radio reports how one white man running for U.S. Senate next door on Ohio’s fruited plain rants against CRT, tweeting, even, at the children of Martin Luther King, Jr. that he knows better than they what thoroughfare of brotherhood their father beat for freedom. Amid such noise from this less-than-noble nation, a beautiful squirrel darts from amber underbrush along the margins, campaigns for space before my Good Year tires. It’s no match for my speed here beneath the spacious sky, my blue CR-V, my alabaster hands— not Jesus—at the wheel. Once, in another life, when I lived in that state, I voted for that guy. This morning, I am more hurry than heedful, & crush the rural spine on Hoosier macadam. I tried to avoid it, 48

but I am more than complicit. Forever separated from its shadow that used to follow its body ascending the oaks & maples now shedding their leaves, does the squirrel cry on impact though no one hears it, not even me since Green Day’s now blaring on the radio? Charlatans, the candidate called Bernice King & Martin Luther King III, who lost their dad to a patriot dream, dimmed by endless tears. Can you hear the sound of hysteria? Billie Joe Armstrong retorts. I ruminate as I go, muttering aloud to no one like—what else?—an idiot, blood under my nails like dirt because once upon a time, I was born into this supposed jubilee, because I can’t seem to stop the killing.

A Best of the Net and seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Julie L. Moore is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Full Worm Moon, which won a 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature's 2018 Book of the Year Award. A previous contributor to Tipton Poetry Journal, Moore has also published poetry in African American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Image, New Ohio Review, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and Verse Daily. She is the Writing Center Director at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana, where she is also the poetry editor for Relief Journal. Learn more about her work at julielmoore.com.