The Last Word — “Wherever the Head Lies” by Cheyenne Moore

Photo courtesy of Bachtlar Rahady, Flickr creative commons: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rahady/4304181442/
Photo courtesy of Bachtlar Rahady, Flickr creative commons: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rahady/4304181442/

Our May contributor to The Last Word was Cheyenne Moore, with her poem “Wherever the Head Lies”
*Note: this poem first appeared in The Atlas, Volume 9 (MWC Press, 2014)

Wherever the Head Lies 

I have never owned the roof above my head,
And that in itself is rather sobering.
From birth I have been renting my right to exist in this world,
And thus home took a new meaning.
It was never defined by copied keys,
But by the conversations, the arguments, the broken dishes that make up the memories.

In recent years home has turned inside out,
And the broken glass has overtaken the flow of words.
But from this I have learned that home cannot be found
in other human beings.
Our ribs are fragile structures
that cannot withstand the winter.

Home isn’t bought and it isn’t owned.
We do not reside within it, but it resides within us.
Cheyenne Moore is an aspiring polyglot from Princeton, Iowa. In 2015, she hopes to defend her title of 1st place Scenar­io Writer in the FPSPI Scenario Writing Competition and learn Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese. After that lies a career in translation and traveling, and hopefully many more publications. Cheyenne was a Young Emerging Writers Intern in 2014.


The Last Word is open to submissions (MWC members get first priority). To submit, please send one poem (no longer than 30 lines; other formatting considerations, such as line length, should also be taken into account) or one work of short prose (fiction/non-fiction, 500 words max) in a MS Word file (.doc, .docx, .rtf) to mwc@midwestwritingcenter.org, and include the phrase “The Last Word Submission” in the subject line. Please also include a brief bio (50 words max). Selections will be made each month by MWC staff and guest editors.