Melissa Eleftherion: No One Owns a Body
Jamison McAndie
ditch poem # 13
pink ditch in wilderness
gash in the ground
damp & rent with salt
no one owns a body
origin of the cave
slowly seeping water
woman excavates
her mouth
from the ditch
when the pink ditch opens
that gash in the burial ground
all the terrestrial hues
we become
the rattle and branches
the camber of witness
we become wilderness
its meat gap its claw
twilit by bones, tumult
the breaking through
Marcasite
(for Mom)
The fractures are uneven
Where you hid the groceries
Where you hid the wailing
The shifting plates
Become
Where a shell escapes to
Become familial
<its own terrors>
Little islands
<even the paper tectonics>
In the brass morning light
Sex was on the walls
In the quiet
In the radiation
Little rusted springs
In the vestibular
A weary grown together
Matches & dust
Little springs intergrown
From tabular parallels
Your family becomes my family
A child becomes a homing device
Some solution takes place here
Diluted gases in the cooling
Melissa Eleftherion was born & raised in Brooklyn. She is the author of huminsect, prism maps, Pigtail Duty, the leaves the leaves, green glass asterisms, and several other chapbooks. Her first full-length collection, field guide to autobiography, is forthcoming from H_NGM_N. Founder of the Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange, Melissa lives in Mendocino County where she works as a Teen Librarian, teaches creative writing, & curates the LOBA Reading Series at the Ukiah Library. More of her work can be found @ www.apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.
