Poetry by Nicole Melchionda

To My Mentor

I remember the first day we met: you floated in,
camouflage pants, combat boots, tattoos,
those explosive ashy curls, and you asked us to call
out our least favorite word as you wrote them on the whiteboard.
Mine was discombobulated.
Perfectly metrical, you said.
You were the first teacher I ever heard
drop the unspeakable f-bomb.
My sapling ears unfurled as each dendrite zipped
to the staccato -/ of every subject you traversed.
You lectured us for ten minutes
on why “moist” makes everyone uncomfortable--
something to do with the movement
of tongue against roof and compression of lips,
some mouth science you knew well.

I’d been writing poetry since I was twelve,
thinking I was hot shit,
but quickly saw underneath your scalpel
that experienced bones don’t always carry talent in the marrow.
As I evolved, I wasn’t aware that I was coral,
housing fleeting mythos, collecting
increasingly deeper abrasions as they squeezed through me.

You were raised Catholic
but embraced your daughter’s girlfriend.
Funny, I thought, that so many Catholics had gay children.
I was baptized Protestant, but born an atheist.
You spoke nonchalantly about going to therapy.
I wondered if you needed help
because you were losing your religion.

Your forearm is bilingual.
I’d squinted at your inky branding many times:
pessoa.
“Person,” you explained years later. “The only label I want to have
when words are all we have left.”

You told me your secret, bared poignantly
but with ease in the constricting, safe womb
of your office where we bonded
after I confided in you that my story of abuse
refused to conform to any poem.
You told me that sometimes the best way to exorcise those feelings
is to assign them to a different story.
I realized that your hair must be so big
because your skull struggled to contain all of your force.

Then I learned you had a son
from that poetry collection you wrote.
I understood this was a wound too fatal to speak aloud.
I’d knock the breeze right back into you
still if I could, one whipstitch in time.
Winded, I recalled years ago when I mentally constructed
my note, which was flushed away slowly by the heart
that refused to stop beating,
and it feels so unfair that you never got his,
that I am here and he is not,
that so much shrapnel can be carried
in one woman, in one smiling woman.

​


Pseudomorphism

I worried you’d come into me
as galaxies of untethered cells
and that each of my lungs would absorb your entire biosphere.
Yesterday I touched the Barringer meteorite
and felt uneasy about mother/land,
that I could unearth my vessels and lasso past
our asterisms to strike the millionth lightyear
from which it came, retrace the cosmic migration we once made.
These neurotransmitters were regifted from my blood sibling
through burst sulcus. We are both broken, but mindful
of our endeavors dated beyond forever.
When I held that sliver of myself in my palm,
all I could think about is how we procreate
until our numbness fades, and I will simply become
a body of bodies, no longer as mystical as our origins.

​


Thyroid Storm

Virginal blood smudged on your doorframe
was the contract we signed unknowing the borders between our bodies
would dissolve and like a primitive Hephaestus,
we would pound ourselves together, molten metal and all,
until we screamed as one.
Memories were once clearer than surfacing veins but now
I can’t recall my life before our reincarnation.
Your blood swaddles poison and I can’t drain what’s rotting deep below.
For years I’ve panicked until I met death
and felt the visionless void wringing my lungs:
I can’t bear the thought of carrying two minds in one oversized body.
I dream of news reports where paramedics arrive ten minutes late,
and consoling professors gift me the sketches of your tattoos,
and wailing on the kitchen floor at the sight of our utensils spooning
with only one hand to pull them apart.
I awake and like a newborn monkey I cling to your back.
With the horrified helplessness of onlookers who hear me curse
my unused fertility still fresh in my dream-widowed cortex,
I beg with a mouth full of cotton.
The tears on your shirt too impermanent and unbinding,
your heart chugs on with indifference
and your plate still waits for the morning oatmeal.

​

Bio: Nicole Melchionda is a graduate of Stetson University where she majored in English with a minor in creative writing. There she completed an independent study on gothic poetry with award-winning poet Terri Witek and earned membership to Phi Beta Kappa. The interests that infiltrate her work include biology, human anatomy, cosmology, psychology, and interpersonal relationships. She has worked as an English teacher in China and now resides in Poland.

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