David Antonio Moody, Bacopa Literary Review 2015's Third Place Poetry winner, is a writing instructor at Arizona State University and production editor for The Cortland Review. David received a 2014 AWP Intro Journal Award, and his poetry has appeared in Spillway, Streetlight, The Apply Valley Review, Gingerbread House, Eleven Eleven, Artful Dodge, and Breakwater Review (Peseroff Prize). His prize-winning poem for Bacopa:
Wasp and Pear
Every year I find myself giving up on trees
lightning-struck, brown, full of sawfly larva
but shingling the dog's pen.
Hurricane
season can often leave us just like this:
with wood tacks, lumber, with caulk guns and caulk,
gallons of water, and surplus tape spools.
But yellow cling peaches stored in a can,
how they imply what is kept in the sky,
what message it's got, if something is left.
But soon, always soon, mouths become hungry,
then fruit season leaves.
Chipping potatoes.
Field hands lobbing cabbage over my fence
in trade for water. I offer a watch
and eat well that night.
It goes like this.
The grove drops its flesh.
Some dawns I hear it--
a soft pear's giving up into a fall,
its wet brown pulp a bruise on the earth. Then
wind-jagged wasps come to perch on its rot,
That they love what's dead. That I do, do not.
