Poetry by Melanie McCabe

            Christopher Sessums CC




The Body, Broken

The body, broken, is a new thing, cleft and then 
seamed-- the faulty excised; relics, rewired.

The old neighborhood, but houses hide breathers
of a different cadence.  Decrescendo.  Doloroso. 

It is a mystery -- cracked, end-tied -- the cover
closed on subplot; all of the machinations

of minor characters left to stew.  Yet you hear them,
restless in their stories, words muffled by walls.

You know they are not finished being unhappy --
that they will see things through without you.

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Housing Market

Okay, then -- so I am not any longer a brick house, 
but something closer to clapboard. Pretty enough 
in my day, but now, buckling with warp. Pocked. 
Beneath another slapdash of paint, very nearly stucco.
At fifteen, I didn’t know the goldmine I lived
inside of, the jackpot I could be with just my mouth 
and thighs. I was stacked, that’s a fact, but more like 
a deck of cards that wasn’t mine. More like 
odds in a casino game I didn’t know the rules to. 
I was a gem then. Sparkling. I had curb appeal. And yet,
you could have had me for a song.

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Melanie McCabe's latest collection of poems, The Night Divers, will be out from Terrapin Books in August. She is also the author of two previous books of poetry, What The Neighbors Know and History Of The Body. as well as a memoir, His Other Life: Searching For My Father, His First Wife, and Tennessee Williams. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Washington Post, The Georgia Review, Threepenny Review, and many other journals.  
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