Melanie Perish

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Brother as Pair of Broken Glasses

or pine needles clogging the gutter,
the  downspout,  the drop outlet on
a model house.  As Bermuda grass
gone feral; the all   of  summer in a
muggy  4th of July   where we sleep
on our dead.   A dusty-winged moth
bumping   against a porchlight. Did
it hurt the moth,  not getting what it
wanted    from    the   light?     As a
cartographer    erasing    the   name
of the  town   where we lived. How
I want to remember you: as candles
lit in a power failure  and that these
candles cast shadows  that doubled
the people and the darkness. As a hard
rain that kisses every crack ‘til it gives.

Melanie Perish – a gender-fluid crone – is interested in poetry and poets. Her work has appeared in Sequestrum, The Meadow, Rust & Moth, Calyx, Abandoned Mine, Sinister Wisdom, Common Lives Lesbian Lives, Caesura, and other small press publications. Melanie’s work was chosen for Nevada Humanities’ Double Down Blog and she was a featured poet for Moon Tide Press recently. Passions & Gratitudes (Black Rock Press, 2011,) The Fishing Poems(Meridian Press, 2017,) Foreign Voices Native Tongues (Single Wing Press/ Blurb, 2021) are her collections. She is a member of Poets & Writers and is often featured in online and in-person poetry events.