excerpt from “Warning shot across the bow” by Jessica Moore

Poet name: excerpt from “Warning shot across the bow” Poem Name: Jessica Moore Poem: One man from the wreck named the smell of nutmeg, limes The whole world becomes perilous We don’t speak of so many things as though by keeping quiet we keep ourselves safe (Ourselves, or them?) A few brave or tired ones came forward tired of dragging this quiet thing around with them, tired of fighting the slippery path in the middle of love in the middle of the kitchen rife with citrus Green rinds wrung dry beside the knife End of Poem. Credits: Copyright © Jessica Moore Published in The Whole Singing Ocean, (Nightwood Editions, 2020). JESSICA MOORE is an author and literary translator. Her first book, Everything, now (Brick Books 2012), is a love letter to the dead, and has been called “a powerful journey through love and loss – serving, ultimately, to unsettle any notion of a boundary between them.” The book is also, in part, a conversation with her translation of Turkana Boy (Talonbooks 2012) by Jean-François Beauchemin, for which she won a PEN America Translation Award. Mend the Living, her translation of the novel by Maylis de Kerangal, was nominated for the 2016 Man Booker International and won the UK’s Wellcome Book Prize in 2017. Jessica’s most recent book—The Whole Singing Ocean (Nightwood 2020)—is a true story blending long poem, investigation, sailor slang and ecological grief. She lives in Toronto.