Melanie Figg

Perfect Lake of Water 

You rage against me because I will not obey you, you who have never been worthy of obedience. I will never ask for your obedience. I am more than a reflection of your fears. I am constant—light and hunger and regret. These are the hours in which you clock your habits. I reflect nothing that you do not need to see. What you request is always the same—a sentimental habit that leaves you no clearer to make a difference. You need interruption, so I storm. You need inspiration, so I swelter. I refuse romantic notions of strength and love. What do you know about honor? I am full of the lost and the hopeless—I tend to their cold desires. I am heavy from their unfinished business. Their regret becomes mine as I nurse the shoreline. Never ending, imagine ever ending. 

**
 
This first appeared in Saranac Review, and in Trace (New Rivers Press).


**
Evensong

How could I have known my husband’s death would leave me begging? That a fist full of children would call me witch and be believed? My mother and her mother taught me willow bark eases childbirth and lavender strengthens the stomach. I saved the Putnam girl from fever and now she screams when I approach. Mother, is it you or My Lord who has forsaken me? They are hanging me at sunset. That crowded anger will flush from the climb up Gallows Hill. But once their fever cools and their faces match the faded sky a hush will be born. They will watch the pendulum of my body mark their remaining time. 

Soon I will be was. And lifting, over this town, fields of stone, roads muddy and climbing, mulberry to rot. Moving, I move. The birds call high and hard. I follow them. Trees rustle.

**

This was previously published by Margie, now called American Journal of Poetry.

**

A Passing Sorrow
 
It was caught by the sticky wind, blowing north from the Army research lab next door. It dropped onto their tomato plants, onto their leaf lettuce. It tangled in the long stems of the cosmos and dill. It skidded across the cord of wood stacked neatly at the back end of the carport, and nestled into the barked grooves. It landed on the roof of the tan Datsun, and it powdered the front steps that no one used. In the spring her mother mistook it for pollen or stubbornness. It ruined the herbs but fortified the squash. It readied their lungs for asthma in later years, and made them predisposed to excessive worrying and poor circulation. It sprinkled doom over the neighbourhood and would take decades to clear out of the groundwater. The official press release said everything was fine.

**

Piano Recital No. 1

I kept telling my teacher that I don’t know this minuet. Only my hands know it, only my fingers and how they stretch the keys, the curve and pull in my palms. I don’t trust this paper of black chatter and now I’m up on stage, black bow starched tight around my middle, my feet dangling. Play, play I tell my hands. I try to avoid that wall of faces blank and waiting as my palms. My mother not even breathing. My hands stumble, heaving fish on the dock. All that music stuffed into my fingertips stares up at me, blurry eyed and dying. All of them watching. Until I stand fast and walk off that stage. Under waves of applause, my hands hang heavy. My mother runs after me to tell me she is proud of my poise. Laughter is a fishbone small and fragile in my throat.

**

The Fates

My neighbour loves her rented chickens. She’s wired tight, judges my sweatpants. She used to be in the Peace Corps long ago. The chickens must speak to her peace corp. She talks to them each morning. I dream she wakes up just to see them—she loves them different than her old dog and three kids.  They’ve made her remember a part she’s forgotten, maybe. In this way, they are magic birds. Three sisters—moody in their mythic trio—scrying into their water dish, seeing a future radically different than their days inside the small fence, scratching for grubs, fluffing their soft feathered bodies, boosting their fluff until it’s unbearable to not pick them up and clutch them to your stubbornness. If only we could all rent dreams to see if they fit, and never leave the yard. 

**

Vampire’s Tale: New England, the nineteenth century

This isn’t heaven. My family stood by my bed those last moments, wiping my stained lips, stroking my pale round face—my skin so clear they watched the wings behind my shoulders unfold. Those last hours—days? weeks?—the world became fluid and large with every breath. My lungs, frantic crows knocking in their cages, took in the world, folded it beneath a dark wing and slowly released it back. Never has my life meant so much, lying there rinsing the world around me. So why these shovels, this cutting? I see them here from the hidden heart of maple. Perhaps they want to free those crows, slow but still fluttering, take them in their own hands and give their breath to birds. It is how the living touch flight. I forgive them their trespasses here in the curious glance of the moon.

**

Author’s note: Consumption was the most common cause of death in 19th century New England. Believing contagion was the dead preying on the living, families and medical doctors sometimes exhumed the dead and burned the consumptive’s lungs in an attempt to contain the disease. My hometown in Vermont performed such a ceremony in 1817.

**
​
Melanie Figg’s collection, Trace, was named one of the Best Indie Poetry Books of the Year by Kirkus Reviews. Her work has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, MD State Arts Council, and others and been published in dozens of journals including The Colorado Review, Nimrod, The Rumpus, and the American Journal of Poetry. As a certified professional coach, she teaches writing, offers women’s writing retreats, and works 1-1 with writers. www.melaniefigg.net