I’m sure to wear my pantyhose, the nude, sensible kind—snag free, professional, and I smooth my skirt down. You won’t find me now with my knees and their knobby faces, their shamey pink flesh. I burned myself to a magenta flush my first ironing job, the whole 3-jointed siding of one finger puckered up, then off. Like a bloom. Or a kiss. I’ve got it down pat: pleats, darts, cuffs […]
I’d probably already know the question. I wouldn’t mouth what, what like a screen door smacks in the wind what, what would it take, could I divulge it? I wouldn’t cringe between the hair-triggers and eyes charcoaled with grief. Did I do that to you? I snap hard against our frame. A goldfish may leap out of its tank, suffocate. A betta may just bludgeon itself to death. […]
Welcome to our special edition posting, “Doing Lines.” For this theme we were looking for one-liner poetry: powerful, humorous, or interesting ideas conveyed with few words. As previously promised in our guidelines, our favorite line appears at the top of the bunch. We chose Brenda J. Gannam’s line because it was the one that socked us in the gut the hardest, and because we could see an entire story unfolding […]
Listen: https://soundcloud.com/melancholyhyperbole/if-i-was-a-man If there’s one thing you can’t lose It’s that Feel -Tom Waits If I was a man, I’d write about how the bottle is my left hand, because my right is busy – I’ve known so many girls and while the names are different, to me their faces are all the same, hazy, open-mouthed, and six inches from my face. I’d write about my […]
Mauve Mauve pale bruised purple lips of a girl loved too well, the cold flush of an eggplant’s flesh; the sultry bubble slow and breathy filtering through the room. It is the slick taste of her lipstick. Wine, clotted with tannins, hours after. The peace a mouth settles into after sex. She has become them: the blinds’ soft fingertips crafting maps of the world, wanting to touch every […]
Our Chaucer, I think, would have sighed. He would have assured us, shaking his sorrowful head, That day the solar system married us Whether we knew it or not –Ted Hughes Now that we spent an afternoon with Crow. Now in the breadth of highway between us. Now after your presented death and my Wide like a canyon, like the end Of God’s whip, I can appreciate Our limestone. […]
The other end of my phone is empty echoing your voice mail, each evening your name is locked in time, the space I knew I could call you mine, the days I wasn’t asking: Where are you love, my love, my God, where have you gone, what have you done and who knows how to hold you with the caress of their words when the world splinters in the quiet? […]
Before you, there were women with full breasts, breasts with perk tips and beneath them: hips wide as my hand spread, but never love. Athenas before you, my eyes only followed the apples; and then, suddenly: A wild brook unleashed and I never knew I was a basin meant to be filled. A women sewn from the smile of Coyote, from the same hands that bent time and created life […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 