Flight Risk by Penelope Moffet

Flight Risk

So you’ve packed up some books to send
to friends – a great Calyx issue, your favorite
Marge Piercy – and now your heart clutches,
says Unwrap them, put them back on their shelves,

and it’s only two books, so how can you think
you’ll easily release every treasured, eye-worn,
well-thumbed thing, ceramics chosen over decades
in thrift stores and at craft shows, mismatched, unchic

but yours, the etched brandy snifter from your nephew’s
wedding, the blue and purple hatchetfish painting
by your mother, a friend’s charcoal sketch of oaks,
the Queen Anne chairs with high curved backs

and hoof-like feet, the hummingbird-patterned
cotton sheets on your sleep number bed,
50 years of manuscripts and journals,
this high-ceilinged third-floor place you bought

in 2010, first and only home you’ve ever owned,
the furry orange being who lives with you
and oh – the people you might never see again –
how could you think you could let all of this go

if you must flee the country you were born in,
the land you love, the place you used to think you knew?

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Penelope Moffet’s most recent chapbook is Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022). Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Calyx, Willawaw, Nerve Cowboy, Red Eft Review and other literary journals. She has poems upcoming at Sheila-Na-Gig Online, Eclectica, Silver Birch Press and an anthology of Southwestern writers to be published by Dos Gatos Press. A full-length collection of her poetry will be published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2026. She lives in Southern California.