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Untitled
Melissa Studdard
from the book Dear Selection Committee
My address is nostalgia
for things that never happened. I wander in
and out of coincidence, dragging a wagonful
of unrequited lovers behind me. I visit
the infirmary for broken
planets and ill poets, where I bandage
metaphors and remove stitches from busted
couplets. All will be well again—poets
restored to their regular neurotic tendencies,
free to enter emotional and psychological
terrain that would make others
run panicked from the landslides
in their own minds. Oh—what we embrace
to avoid the life we’ve been given. Oh—
what we embrace to live the life we’ve been given.
Call everything you’ve ever done
Untitled. It’s the only honest way to create. Generate
a disaster in your life to sidestep
the true catastrophe of your life. Oh—there’s a universe
with a bell around its neck, purring outside
your bedroom door. Let
it in. Oh—I tried to make this about you,
but it’s about me me me.
My awful claws. My electric arch. Bats and blue jays
hunted from trees. I thought
I was good, but I never was. I’m coming home
with a bleeding angel
between my teeth. Open the door to the heart’s door.
Imperfection is the only
muse. And I am her handmaiden. Please
love me anyway.
Melissa Studdard’s most recent book is the poetry collection Dear Selection Committee (Jackleg Press). Her work has been featured by PBS, NPR, The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, The Guardian, the Best American Poetry blog, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day and has garnered awards such as The Penn Review Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Award, the Tom Howard Award, and more. As a librettist/lyricist, she has had works commissioned by Aspen Music Festival, Wolf Trap, Yale Institute of Sacred Music, and the University of Michigan School of Music. With Kelli Russell Agodon, she co-hosts the Youtube poetry series Poems You Need. You can find her at www.melissastuddard.com and www.youtube.com/@PoemsYouNeed
Adrift
Ross Williamson
Originally appeared in Defunct Magazine
Standing on the rocks just past the seafoam,
I see the shadowed clouds on ocean waves
and know this is where the gateway between
life and death is eroded, dust to dust.
My dead stand on the water, watching me.
Salted wind whips their hair, their shells, their scales.
I wonder if they will summon lightning
and inch away from the encroaching tide.
But ocean air is in my DNA,
the legacy of ungrateful monsters
who crawled out to lay their eggs. Later us.
Billions long-forgotten and fossilized.
I wonder if we melt glaciers so we
will once again be eaten by the sea.
Ross Williamson's work has appeared in Poetry City, Defunkt, Cutthroat, and Inkling Magazine and is forthcoming in Southword. Williamson has served as editor at the University of Houston's Glass Mountain Magazine as well as Lone Star College's Inkling Magazine and is currently working on an MFA in poetry at Southern Connecticut State University.
Bird
Niki Herd
Yesterday, at Shepherd and Gray, the parking lot was
filled with birds, black birds, actually grackles. It was a grackle
lot; instead of a bumper on a car, there were ten grackles, instead
of a sunroof, fifty grackles sat high, their bodies shimmers
under cheap strip mall lights as shoppers delayed their spending
to pull out phones and take shots, such spectators we were,
like that summer in July, when I was left again
to wonder who was the child and who the adult,
that Sunday evening that hung in the air like bug spray
when my father, the one who fed me and gave me his last name,
stood two stories on our family porch, every neighbor,
in all manner of dress, drawn from their homes, in the street watching.
Let me tell you how he spread his arms wide, like the man
he was before Vietnam, or before the schizophrenia.
Let me tell you how a child learns the alphabet by counting,
how she learns only 2 letters separate the words hero and heroin,
how he stood high on the ledge of a porch the child never much
liked because there was a crack in its wooden center as if the world
was waiting to open its jaws to swallow her body whole.
Let me tell you how that July evening didn’t hold death,
but instead was the preface to death. The point being he jumped.
Some will say there are worse songs to sing, others might believe it
a tragedy, but who are we to question the Gods when a man
unconcerned with the inconvenience of his presence shows up
in a parking lot winged as an army of himself? Eventually, lights
went dark in the shops and each watcher retraced their steps back home
to find their families, to rejoice over food, to laugh and settle the night;
and the birds, steadfast they stood, not quite ready for flight—
Niki Herd is the author of the poetry collections The Stuff of Hollywood and The Language
of Shedding Skin, as well as the chapbook _____ , don’t you weep. She coedited with Meg Day Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master. Herd’s poetry, essays, and criticism appear in the Academy of American Poets (Poem-a-Day), Poetry Daily, New England Review, Salon, and This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, among other journals and anthologies. Her work has been supported by MacDowell, Ucross, Bread Loaf, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Newberry Library, and Cave Canem. Herd has taught at the University of Houston and Washington University in St. Louis. She lives in Lancaster, PA where she teaches at Franklin & Marshall College.
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