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Click title to download microchap
Cover – Baby Buggy, Vintage
by Melanie Faith
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newfoundling
You are yet in the bread cave,
the woman cage whose jaws
will unhinge for passage—
what should I say, supple firecracker,
animate sapling,
about this world-place? Today there’s
intermittent
thunderboomers. Driving gales. The
kind that sideways blind,
dampens hems and soddens coat-sleeves.
This, too, happens: we must meet and heft
discomfort
deepening in the marrow. Seldom, though,
does it last longer than a shiver
and a cast off,
just as your mother knits and purls,
preparing midst sickness.
born
There are many ways to be born
into this life. Wriggle worms
form new skins, shed unnecessary ones.
Water and wine and from the hand
of God to the hand of God returned.
Song is another that makes the heart better.
There is the body finding a body.
There is a body’s own body thinning
or thickening. There is befriending.
Puppies or kittens or canaries or fish -
there is animal affection, given then given
back.
There are travels in big planes, there are
imaginative leaps. Thirty-five years,
all of these ways - only one
you-gift.
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better self
In the dream
my baby was born
a week after you
came into this world.
They laid her supple form on my chest.
I need to have a book,
I told everyone within earshot,
I named her to name her
Sophia Veronica. Sophia because
I like the sharp s with the soft f,
the spirited old world charm
whose meaning is wisdom. Veronica,
the protagonist in a nineties sitcom
I flicked through the night before.
From the labor bed, despite the tearing
of my flesh, as the horror stories I’ve heard
about birth, I clambered
down stairs immediately after delivery
to fetch the naming book myself.
Surely, this says something more
about your auntie than I’ll admit
— when awake. I was sorry
to awaken. To find - but not for myself
Sophia Veronica wasn’t my body’s
but another, more familiar kind
of my creation. I was sorry
Dear Peanut, Sister’s Little Sprout,
that I have no cousin to offer you
- but what I have to offer you
a collection of my better self
in alphabet.
about this world
What to say about this world?
That there will be years
you’ll yearn for passage from here.
Others, you’ll mourn the inevitable leaving.
only those you hold closest — The irony
can push away until it breaks the bone
in cellular despair. If you hold no one close,
you break anyway.
Satisfaction is limited here:
when it’s 90 degrees and clear,
people grouse for snowflakes fall.
When it’s deep below freezing
they bemoan for sun they loathed.
No one makes it
through this world unscarred.
Physically or in the heart’s secret
compartments, wounds accumulate. Yet
who can explain it? On a road to nowhere,
-- out of nowhere
wonder
flares like a strand of Christmas bulbs
from night’s velvet canvas,
and you drive past, head swiveling
marveling
for this life, it’s worth every kind of
moment.
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Melanie Faith © 2011
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Melanie Faith holds an MFA in poetry from Queens University of Charlotte, NC. She has been a small town journalist, an ESL classroom teacher for international students, and (currently) a literature and writing tutor at a college prep high school, an online creative writing instructor, and a freelance editor.