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Melissa Lee

I have been previously published in Anon, the Bluechrome Press anthology Boho Women Peeling Oranges, Poets Anonymous, and I am forthcoming in Magma, Transmission, Rain Dog and Dream Catcher. I write mainly poetry, and prose concerned with the existential, and feel my work is deeply rooted in metaphysic and a desire to make impulse tangible. I am a mother of two living in Blackburn, Lancashire.

Beside her Sick-Bed a Dark World Floods

There is a whole black night waiting for us!

A whole night, with broad shoulders, a hat and coat -

and a coin moon, that you could just take

with your whole body, and pocket, that someone

more careless than you discarded. The night does not frown!

It is tireless, and I am too afraid to sleep. Our hands

within its cloak will be blue and dark; metal

without the rust of age, the mark of year and day,

and all of this, and we would wash it away -

        the child has contracted shingles,

       her tiny nerves are on fire,

       her hair is dry and unruly, like frayed wool -

        she sulks and reads storybooks,

        and I love her as though she is mine,

        and she is mine and yet I turn and brush

        like a cold wing against her, against her

        shiny ideals, her little round world,

        and I trouble her

        because I am always around her,

        and always troubled.

Baby harks and cries through the radio-monitor. He cries,

though he only has half a heart in it. His vocal chords distort

and gnaw at us- we ignore his howls and sink into the sofa.

I know that it is truly black and there are many reasons

we must stay our vigil in this house, to keep hours

from going astray, in our modernised nests, sterile as wombs.

And we must clean up milk-vomit and wipe up mess;

we must eat all of the food and not lose our appetite

and let everything go to waste. We must sound-proof ourselves.

Should we stay quiet, and hear a stair-stepping heartbeat in the night,

we must inhale the stifling operatics of each other’s distress-

until all of our thoughtless phonetics hit hard places

and bounce into one another’s footsteps, moments.

Until the windows glaze over and no-one can peep into our houses.

We must flood. Let the whole heart, the whole night

flood right through the chambers of the heart, autricle, ventricle; the mind,

with each wave beat and crash; take everything out with each rush,

leaving behind only pieces of things we have missed,

so that we can still hear our pulses in the night when all is lost -

leave only the waterlogged veins in our bodies and our nerves

crackling through us, little sparks -

The whole night, my love, it has careered into us.

Her sick-bed has become a boat and rocked her away from us.

His screams have fallen flat on its shores strewn with damp blankets.

And we were so silent, love, so eroded,

we didn’t even feel it hit, didn’t feel it sweep for us.

copyright © Melissa Lee