Melody Wang - Two Poems
Content Warning: grief, fertility
In an attempt to heal from this absence,
I make it a point to meditate each new moon,
one hand placed on my belly, the other on my heart.
A time for new beginnings, but I am still suspended
in the past, my fists clenched as if to keep myself in place. My place
in the vast multiverse, uncertain at best. No time to grieve, I march on
as if in a dream: tell me again why I need all this strength
In the next room, my lover works into the wee hours. Fueled
by coffee and the pulse of progressive melodies, he throws
open the window to greet the night air in a sweet embrace
He, both familiar and strange to me, convenes
with the same new moon that infuses his broad
shoulders with a renewal that somehow eludes me
In a forgotten town
the somber night stretches
its spindly fingers, silent
and desperate to pry off
the last of the urchins
that still cling to the rock
as dark waves weep below —
they appear now, guided
by feather-soft moonlight,
these overlooked fishermen
boys with aged eyes and grit etched
onto jaundiced faces, who cast
their nets into brooding sea
only to yield cold-scaled
bodies pungent with decay
where their dreams should be
Best viewed on desktop, please also find a PDF file available to download here.
Melody Wang currently resides in sunny Southern California with her dear husband. In her free time, she dabbles in piano composition and also enjoys hiking, baking, and playing with her dogs. She is a reader for Sledgehammer Lit and can be found on Twitter @MelodyOfMusings
Artwork: Moonlight One by Anne McDonald
Anne McDonald is an Irish spoken word poet, artist and creative writing teacher whose work is centered on the challenges we face in a society that is changing rapidly around us and how we respond or react to those changes. She is a great believer in the power of poetry and art to heal, communicate, collaborate and connect. Anne’s art is nature based and depicts raw images where the lines between humanity and nature merge and blend.