nox
the inconvenience of being my heart raced faced azure
like an augur bartered with my conscience minutes became
hours my mom’s shooting up the door’s stuck emotions jut
like towers that summer i smoked weed she told me i was nearly aborted
& when i came michael was almost my name
J.L. Moultrie
J.L. Moultrie is a Detroiter and multi-genre writer who communicates his craft through words. He hasn’t been the same since encountering Hart Crane, James Baldwin & Patti Smith. He considers himself a modern, abstract imagist.
Why this Knocked Taylor Out:
This is a really great example of prosody in poetry adding to the content rather than subtracting from it. As most of our readers know we don’t love hard end rhymed poetry. Moultrie is able to bring some of that musicality here though, without it turning into a nursery rhyme (no hate to the OG’s tho). I mean the soundwork goes crazy here. The opening "a" sound assonance is brilliant in the way it opens the throat and pushes the pace along. It keeps you engaged from word to word.
Speaking of pace, this is a quick paced short poem which I really appreciate because it's like "whew hold up let me get back in there and read this again to see what's going on" and I like how that forces my attention. I mean this poem just demands that readers try and slow down but it's resisting that slowing at the same time, which is a great use of tension in poetry.
I think there are a lot of gem moments in this poem to sink into as you let its music move through you.
Interview:
Why did you choose Team Taylor for this poem?
I felt that Taylor and I shared some overlapping in terms of our appreciation for poetry and
our literary sensibilities. As my poems have become more immersed in assonance and sound
texture, I knew I wanted a very sensitive reader to engage with this poem.
How do you typically approach soundwork in your poetry and how did you approach it in this poem?
I love the way words are unique depending on who’s speaking and how variables such as
mood influence expression. The opening four words came to me first at a single moment and I
feel they serve as co-atlases for the sound dimensions explored in the piece. Sound play
generally doesn’t become my focus until the skeleton of the poem is done.
I'm curious about the title of this poem and how you see it working in tandem with the content? This may be pulling back the curtain too much but I'd be curious to know more about how you titled this piece and what threads you want readers to pull on as they read?
“Nox” means “Night” in Latin. An experience I had at thirteen serves as the narrative focus of
the poem. My mom and dad have been in recovery my entire life. One twilight, my mom locked
herself in a bathroom, began using heroin and stopped responding to me. A few hours after
twilight faded into night, she woke up and opened the door. My mom and I have a lot of candid
conversations and an example of that is in the poem.