Melissa Severin lives in Chicago and works in search engine marketing. She earned her MFA in Poetry from New England College, and her poems have appeared in MoonLit, The Alembic, Seven Corners, 42opus, and The Cultural Society. She is also the managing editor of Switchback Books. Brute Fact, her chapbook, was released from dancing girl press, 2008.
This is a Story You Won't Tell the Kids We'll Never Have
Hood of your mouth
scraped with saguaro carcasses
littered across the Sonoran like rust-
eaten tin cans in the bed of a pickup.
That dry scab umber your tongue won't ignore--
what it looked like leaving me:
a dead taste bud, marble putti, corpulent
corpse. My sweet wraith screamed for life. All my life.
passed fast: a kidney stone lasered to oblivion,
a virus on course, those nights more sleep is needed
and it's morning instead. Our chimera rejected me first,
as an only child only could. Last
act of rebellion haywired fallopians.
I was a tar pit for your love
of little things: little coats, little shoes, little bloomers.
Little did you know I'm more geyser
festooned with the obvious bric-a-brac
of breasts and thighs. The same page--
even Gutenberg would be proud--
until I pressed hard, knocked some letters
about, ruining the recitations of a Green humanist
raconteur. I sing this fate with a ship of fool
geologists who know where to hide a body,
not to let on when I whistle lullabies
to cactus wrens sewing my lips shut with cat gut,
prickly pear to cauterize. Our smashed June bug
aglow in an incinerator, some smokestack chute,
turning smoke signal,
intent to rise.
The title is a line from the Jawbreaker song, "Sluttering (May 4th)."
eaten tin cans in the bed of a pickup.
That dry scab umber your tongue won't ignore--
what it looked like leaving me:
a dead taste bud, marble putti, corpulent
corpse. My sweet wraith screamed for life. All my life.
passed fast: a kidney stone lasered to oblivion,
a virus on course, those nights more sleep is needed
and it's morning instead. Our chimera rejected me first,
as an only child only could. Last
act of rebellion haywired fallopians.
I was a tar pit for your love
of little things: little coats, little shoes, little bloomers.
Little did you know I'm more geyser
festooned with the obvious bric-a-brac
of breasts and thighs. The same page--
even Gutenberg would be proud--
until I pressed hard, knocked some letters
about, ruining the recitations of a Green humanist
raconteur. I sing this fate with a ship of fool
geologists who know where to hide a body,
not to let on when I whistle lullabies
to cactus wrens sewing my lips shut with cat gut,
prickly pear to cauterize. Our smashed June bug
aglow in an incinerator, some smokestack chute,
turning smoke signal,
intent to rise.
The title is a line from the Jawbreaker song, "Sluttering (May 4th)."
those first five lines are a rush. wonderful.
(hooray for jawbreaker!)