On Summoning

by Joshua Moore 

Inspired by How the Past Informs the Present, A Conversation with Roger Guenveur Smith & Caroline Randall Williams


Careful,

with my

name 

between

your

teeth.

My grief

is

not

repurposed 

rubber.

A thing

to chew

in lighter

colored

company.

If you 

call

for me

slip a knife

between 

the syllables.

Tell them

that I came

to slit the

stitch work

of their

comfort.

Tell them

that I came

to steal

their 

peace.


About 
Joshua Moore
Joshua Moore is a Nashville poet, and Host/Producer of Nashville Public Radio’s Versify podcast, as well as the Lead Producer for VPM’s forthcoming podcast Seizing Freedom. His work on Versify was nominated for a 2020 Webby Award in Arts and Culture, and Versify was named the best podcast of 2020 by the Nashville Scene. He formerly served as the 2019-2020 Curb Center Fellow in Creating Writing. He is the former Co-Poetry editor and Comics editor of the Nashville Review. He is the winner of a 2018 Academy of American Poets University Prize, a scholarship recipient from The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and The Virginia Quarterly Review Writers’ Conference. He received his BA in English Writing with a minor in Biology Pre-Medicine, from Eureka College, and his MFA in Creative Writing - Poetry, from Vanderbilt University. He is a recipient of the Ronald W. Reagan Fellowship, and former editor of Impressions Literary Arts Journal.
OZ Arts Nashville presents Art Wire: an ongoing collaboration between OZ Arts and The Porch in which 10 writers attend the OZ Arts performance season and respond to the presentations through original writing that is personal, playful, and deeply engaged. The OZ Arts 2019-2020 season offers each Art Wire Fellow a diverse array of inspiration, including innovative Japanese dance artist Hiroaki Umeda; a genre-bending presentation of Frankenstein by Chicago-based company Manual Cinema; and two emotionally raw works with Nashville's own professional dance company, New Dialect, just to name a few.

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