Melissa Morphew Poems

Two little girls,
incandescent in white pinafores,

hold Japanese lanterns against a backdrop
...

Like something Biblical, though he is short
and bald and repairs watches in the back room
of Starshine Jewelers—at least he knows how often
time can be askew, broken, stopped dead—
...

... the old man told the young girl, how he
wrote his soon-to-be wife letters every day
for a hundred days;
he wrote them with a special ink
...

... at midday, she crawled beneath the house
to escape the cloud-blue sky, replace it with
dapple-dusted sun, a grayness and a light,
a quiet of shadows,
...

again, again, smearing themselves with pollen,
false mating which ends in exhaustion; the gardener
shows her the labellum, swollen like a bitten lip,
a bee’s abdomen, coquettish brown-bee-down,
...

... silvered-fish thoughts, blue-shimmered, lithe,
too mercurial to voice, this grief, nimble
blue- shimmer; the sky can take your breath
...

Flowerbeds, wild
with dusty miller, suffer the sea-change of dusk,
lightning bugs swim a reef of rosebushes. Beneath live oaks
reeded with Spanish moss, her daughters play, skinned-knee
...

I’m looking for the perfect
love, a raspberry briar
siphoned to the surface of a toe
with bacon fat, the relief,
...

She swims in the dust light
of an afternoon window—
this taxidermy marvel
of female orangutan and fin,
...

The morning waited—a sparrow in its egg, still and gray—
too early even for the work of dreams.
But something stirred, a twitch of muscle under skin,
as if they knew what was coming—broken glass, shattered sleep,
...