Six poems by Boston-based Melissa Green, author of three books of poetry, including Magpiety; and two memoirs, under World Poetry/Prose Portfolio, curated by Sudeep Sen
A Sea Change
The fever of August has stormed itself out.
Bouts of sweat and fury have blistered me weak.
Wrack, rock, seaweed disentangle and tangle the shore.
Surely I didn’t used to wash my glasses so often.
Afternoons crumble underfoot like shredded wheat.
What a genius I have for confusion.
My handwriting belongs to someone else.
Alzheimer-like, crab-wise, I take down this dictation.
A titian-haired cocker spaniel named Lizzie
Dazzles me, never leaving my side. Anxious. A rescue dog.
Dragged back, I don’t know where my home is either.
Mother, you won’t believe how dark the dark is.
St. Francis received the first stigmata.
Mata Hari wore silk and duplicity like mine.
Mindful of the steps, I write these splintering words
as swords of light hang from the eaves like ice.
My eyes still know winter when I see it.
Hic Jacet
Hide my grave
From turncoat grief
Let autumn storm
My lichened stone
And no one come
To call me home
Let shadows pass
And winter’s priest
But no one make
A chisel’s mark
Nor dates surround
A hyphen’s rune —
Horizon line
The country lane
I traveled on
Afraid alone
I moved stone walls
By granite will
And made the road
A boulevard
A highway nosed
The wilderness
A thoroughfare
Paved over fear
My loving fed
A silver flood
A river raced
Where my heart rose
My footsteps drummed
The stairs of dreams
My whispered tears
Connected stars
A bridge of words
An ocean wide
My human voice
Once entered space
A cobbled song
I sang to God
Matryoshka
My words perish
in the reed’s parish.
This beetle’s carapace
is no surprise.
A Russian doll encloses
independent clauses,
a blood-embroidered egg
candling the wounded age.
Remove the tattooed shell,
reveal what scriveners hold:
a seed, a heart, overfull
of the world since Adam’s fall.
Ephemera
Dolphins fan the selkie’s hair, a nightingale’s tremolo
turns to amber in which a dragonfly wipes her eye, in which
Primavera’s maidens gambol —
here’s how I walk with my cane:
on broken concrete, with carious teeth and barking with laughter.
Scarified. Shrunken. Childless. Shaking. Cruel.
The Eater of Paper, the Drinker of Ink
With my pen point, I dig up the watermark, a white peony soft on my tongue.
In that sweet wafer I taste a cluster of birches, cherry, oak. I swallow acres
of forest, seed pods like limpets at my heart.
The nib plunges into a black current.
Its unguent on my lips, I suck down the streets of Evangeline, the drowned parishes
of Katrina, these lines an alphabet drawn from a corpse’s single alchemized hair.
Library
Ballast, all my books, making me earthfast, each a clearing, a glade, a birch
grove
where goddesses, governesses, girls like me frolic forever. Somewhere between
Graves and Hardy I’d hide, breathless to be read.
Pages, only panes of glass on loved worlds
denied me. Touching serifs’ suffering as my own. Fingers on lips, a kiss’ underside.
On each fly leaf an Em, my mark — a minim, a half-note, a half-life, the fiction of me.
denied me. Touching serifs’ suffering as my own. Fingers on lips, a kiss’ underside.
On each fly leaf an Em, my mark — a minim, a half-note, a half-life, the fiction of me.
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