Sample Poems by Melissa Morphew

Mandala

The former tenant
glued her cabinets shut.
It took an entire Saturday
with hammer and chisel
to break the silicone seals.

He felt like an archaeologist
half-afraid of what he might find—
a shrunken head, a mummified hand,
discarded snake skins,
an embarrassment
of old love letters and patchouli .

But there was nothing—
just a scrim of dust, dulling
the blue and pink cartoon cats
who pranced upon the faded shelf paper.

So why? A fear of roaches or rats?

Would he wake one night
to find a bleary-eyed possum
ransacking his stash of Ramen noodles,
his cache of Uncle Ben’s long grain and wild rice?

He asked the landlord,
who shrugged. “She was an artist.”

And every time he reached
for some cumin or red wine vinegar,
he couldn’t help but wonder
whether she owned any dishes.

He imagined her—parchment thin,
head shaved like a Tibetan monk,
living off water and light,
high on turpentine,
attacking her canvases in a frenzy
of brush strokes which would leave her drained,
sated with pure pigment—
cobalt blues and cadmium reds.

Or perhaps her medium was colored sand—
month after month cajoling each grain
into a labyrinthine whorl and braid,
the Eight-Petaled Lotus of Smashana-Kali
laid out grid by painstaking grid
upon her living room floor.

He checked his vacuum bag for clues—
shards of glass, shredded peacock feathers,
a bit of skin, lizard bones, thistle stings,
a fiber or filament which might explain
such deliberate emptiness—

how any human
could court the echoes
of volcanoes and wishing wells,

the insistent drum
of her heart.

Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid

She swims in the dust light
of an afternoon window—
this taxidermy marvel
of female orangutan and fin,
her face creased in perpetual scream.
The curious have dwindled
to one young man from Nebraska,
who ducked inside to escape the cold.
So she croons to him—the lament
of honeybees in clover,
dragonflies whose wings touch
and untouch the algae-green
ponds of summer—and he is mesmerized
by grief. Her black peony mouth
open and open
as if she would consummate the loneliness
of astrolabes, swallow the cosmos.
He slips behind the velvet rope,
so close, his breath
kisses her mummified scales.
“Hideous,” the Tribune had said. “A hoax.”
But already the young man loves her,
sinking into the depth of oceans,
the coral labyrinth,
the sailors’ lust,
the song.

 Deceit

Flowerbeds, wild
with dusty miller, suffer the sea-change of dusk,
lightning bugs swim a reef of rosebushes. Beneath live oaks
reeded with Spanish moss, her daughters play, skinned-knee
urchins, chub-chub, churoo.

She watches them from her window;
finless mermaids, cavorting the giggled trip and fall
of dress-up, her honeymoon trousseau strewed across the yard—
seashell pink, aqua-blue, anemone lavender—
 the Frederick’s of Hollywood joke girlfriends
perpetrate on Baptist virgins, the hundred-thousandth
keepsake she’d stored away only to let go
like petals of love-me-love-me-not daisies.

She remembers her sweet sixteenth,
how she begged her mother for a silver taffeta dress, danced
in front of the dressing room mirrors, a minnow darting
from glass to glass downward to infinity—
no boy with clumsy hands and a jelly jar
would ever hold her—  

and how once, on a trip to the city, she visited
a mercantile museum, losing corridor after corridor,
amnesiac compass, absentia pole star,
until finally she found herself
amongst Treasures of the Far East, uplit cases of glass
exquisite with jade netsuke, samurai swords, carved ivory Buddhas,
and she paused, time enough
to ponder a Japanese kimono—burnt-orange tsumugi
embroidered with fire-red coi, prized
possession of a  forgotten geisha—
              closed her eyes to feel the silk,

the wrenish toddle, the layered whispers of movement delicate
as the swish of green tea in porcelain cups.
                              
                            Now, her gaze takes-in
her daughters, spinning raucous cartwheels
against a sailor’s sun.             

 In February,
she gave up her lover. May blooms—white clover
iridescent against a tidal line of grass.

 Land of Milk and Honey    
                            
Like something Biblical, though he is short
and bald and repairs watches in the back room
of Starshine Jewelers—at least he knows how often
time can be askew, broken, stopped dead—

        he spends his Sabbath at the Split Silk Baptist Church,
a dry rot ruin circa 1843, the only worshippers
to dart its doors in the last thirty years
brown-gold honeybees. They’ve built their amber-treacled hive
in the hollows of the pulpit.

        And he sits in the back on the last sturdy pew,
eating bread and butter, humming “Green Sleeves,”
lauding his brethren, his sisters, with a saucer
of Ovaltine and tinned molasses.

                                                Sometimes he sleeps
and the bees hover his hair, land on his eyelids
as if he were some exotic hyssop. He welcomes
their strange kisses into his dreams—

                dreams filled with the pungent sweetness
of rotting gardenias, odd nostalgia for the name “Split Silk,”
sounding like spilt milk, or lavender petticoats—muddied,
torn, abandoned on the bank of Jericho creek, where
a Peruvian-lily girl, named Margaret Claire, bends down
to wash mulberry-stains from the curve of her thighs,
the cracked-heels of her feet.

The bees brush his mouth with their rice-paper wings.
 
When he wakes, a bitter taste of marigold stains his lips.
Sunlight gilds the room in sepia and saffron, as if
he is trapped in a photograph one hundred years
too late, and he has no shadow of strength solid
as the scent of lavender, no miracles up his sleeve.

 Icon
    
He could paint Mary Byrd.
The blue leaf-vein of her eyelids,
her black eyes,
pupils dissolving into iris,
no highlight,
only his reflection, blurred—
the chiffon-edge of a scarf
caught in wind.

She was his first humiliation.
The scrawny girl with sinewed arms
who’d shove him down
in playground’s dry weeds—
flat on his back, staring up
into her hunger and behind her
the sun.

Her force pillaged small things—
his lunch tickets, nickels, dimes, jujubes.
And he told no one.
All these years he’s kept her
in silence, a stone
lichened with moss, a shrine by a river.

He could paint Mary Byrd.
A study in brown and yellow.
Her unwashed hair.
The sleeveless mauve dress
she wore day in and day out,
winter and summer.