What to Lay Down

Bobby pin, button, lozenge, dime.
Souvenir, emery board, obsession

with time. Lay them down.
Phone number on a slip of paper,

you can’t remember whose.
Your aunt’s old postcard from Galapagos,

your inability to choose. Lay them down.
The angry words you want to speak,

the grudge you work so hard to keep.
Your petty predilections, small

& senseless premonitions. Lay them down.
The marriage you thought would last

your whole life, dreams you once had
as his faithful wife. I tell you: Lay them down.

Unburdened as you’ll later be, relinquish
one more thing: the birth name you gave

your younger child because now she says it’s dead.
Though it stretch the string between your heart

& head, though it nearly snap in half,
give it up, let it go, lay it down, too.

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A Best of the Net and six-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. Her poetry has appeared in African American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Image, New Ohio Review, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Verse Daily, and a dozen anthologies. She is the Writing Center Director at Taylor University, where she is also the poetry editor for Relief Journal. Learn more about her work at julielmoore.com.