Melanie Maggard
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A Ghost of a Man Maybe it was when she told you she believed in ghosts and you laughed until tears streaked your face. Or when she’d eaten half a watermelon, face sticky shiny, her smile slipping as you said she disgusted you. Or when she drove to your mother’s and you sat in the car in silence. Or when she told your reflection through shower mist she was pregnant and you kept singing until she walked out. Or the day you kept reaching for your keys on the coffee table until you fell through and onto the carpet, wondering where was the shattered glass. ** Monarchs My melon lips married her marshmallow-pink skin, drunk on mulberry wine and mimosas. We shimmered, ran into midnight blue, danced as magnets on mossy grass. Myrtles stood with backs turned as we marveled at the moonlight with cries thick as mandarin syrup. We were the opposite of men. Marooned mermaids, born without and within. Our cheeks flushed mauve when we placed marigolds in our mouths. When night melted, we unburdened the men who told us we were mad with muddled minds and needed them. Together, we feasted on dewy milkweed, stretched wings and mounted gusts, migrated through the morning light. ** The Consequences of Tattoos You inked my name on your skin, so I thought you’d be there forever, like the teddy bear on my nightstand that I took to summer camp every year, my name in my mother’s print in black marker on the foot still visible. My name went with you to work and the gym and the grocery store. You were mine. I couldn’t lose you now. But you started hating me for it, how I was always with you, peering around the edge of your bicep, watching, waiting, wanting more than skin, more than your heart, permanently wanting more, more, more. ** The Lexicon of Women We pulled the 1989 Deluxe Scrabble box from its home under my grandparents’ bed, reinforced corners of brown packing tape holding everything together, like us women on holidays or bad-weather Sundays sitting at the kitchen table creating words and remembering words and wishing words mattered more, hoping to be as wise as our grandmother, our mother, our mother-in-law, who amazed us with triple-word scores learned through newspapers and daily crosswords, books of the Bible and Harlequin romances and community recipes, in this world where all women won, together, while men dozed and laughed to the drone of their own voices. ** Things as Dark as Your Grief Socks, shoes, watch band, belt. Work gloves for wood cutting. Ink from newspapers and seed catalogs. Mornings. Ash in the furnace. Tilled soil. Blight on the beans. Thumbnail from a misplaced hammer strike. Corners in every room of the house you built for her. Berries picked in the thick of summer. Snakes you scared away from her. Cast-iron pans, slick with years of her cooking. Sunday evenings. Nights wrestling sleep in the armchair. Her contoured impression in the recliner cushion. Coffee. Tomorrows. Her handwriting on the notepad by the phone, in the margins of cookbooks, checkbook ledgers, your heart. ** Eating a Tree is to taste bark shredding between your cheeks, to drink sap from woody veins, to grind leaves to dust, to suck hard-candy acorns, to lick dew from budding branches, to swallow spidery roots, to gorge yourself on tender sprouts, to become the forest, to feast on sunlight. ** A Life in Circular Time I walk until everything is new. He yells my name, tells me to come back into the house, to put on some fucking shoes. He claims he needs me. Beyond the fence I step over tall grasses, picking dandelions to create a bouquet of cotton light, hoping to be blinded by the answer I need. I walk outside, sharp green blades explode between my toes, thistles prick my sole. I search pockets and purse for my pills, the need to numb his voice buzzes in my veins. I lose time staring out the deck window, at gold sprouts swaying in the meadow beyond the buzzed yard, sunlight bleaching my fading dreams. My shaking hand traces the valleys imprinted on my cheek. I’m on the icy slate floor of the kitchen, a glittery shadow shimmering where my head rested. I wake, dehydrated from too much champagne, head pounding and popping against my skull. I slide down the cold steel of the refrigerator, tears tracking my cheeks. I comfort him, his sex fresh on my lips, my heart screaming. He says his wife is having an affair, he can’t forgive her, but he can’t leave her either. I have resolutions to share but he’s distracted. In an hour, it will be a new year. ** Devoured Scarlet wounds drip onto the carpet as you break my heart into seven pieces, one for each year we’ve been paired. When you destroy the we that threaded me into this rag doll I called home, sweet home, my filling spills out. I ooze strawberry jam as you lick lips, teeth gleaming pearly white as bone. We’re just a bunch of skeletons underneath it all, you say, and I worry you want to know if my bones fit together like building blocks or if I’m a jigsaw puzzle to be splayed on the dining room table. Your dissection of my faults has been a work in progress and now you present it to me as the reasons why these pounds of flesh and pools of blood that had sex in the bed you loved and I hated was never going to sustain your appetite. You salivate at the thought of something more because there’s nothing left of me but crumbs, not enough to sustain you, you say you’re a man after all. And me? What am I? I’m starvation and thirst and weariness. I am a body undone. I’m wasted. ** Mutual Defense You hide in the cave he made for you on his back, between his sharp edges, in the soft valley between scars and complexes, where it is body-temp warm and chestnut-hair plush, where you listen to his heart ka-thump you into serenity, where in daylight you watch strangers spinning away, ricocheting off his feet or hands or shoulders, their confused faces, their hurt faces, their angry faces staring into his back, straight at you, so you turn away because you can’t handle the carnage, you can’t keep feeling their pain because it thrashes at you and him because at night he joins you by the light of your fire, those edges softening into the shadows, dancing away with the moonlight as his breath calms, as he pulls you close and you slide into place, no more sharpened-steel words flying into the world, only the sound of his whispers of keep-you-safe and want-you-to-be-happy, of I-hope-you-live-forever, no matter what it costs. ** Stillness I'm still and I'm still and I'm still and my legs won't move and my heart has stopped pumping and I'm still in our bed on First and Marion and my eyes won't close and my heart isn’t beating and I'm still in our apartment with the leaky air conditioner drip drip dripping when there's a flash of car lights on the ceiling and they might be yours but then they’re gone and I'm still and it’s all gone and the darkness won't move away from me but stands there watching and I'm still and I'm still and I'm still and a dog barks but I'm still then the phone rings and my skin cracks but I'm still, I'm not splitting, and the last hour’s breath falls to the ground and I hold tight so it can rise again and I'm still and I'm still and I'm still and my phone alarm screams “Good morning” and a song we sang together pushes at me and it's dancing along and I'm still and I'm still and I'm still and I don't see the morning coming and nothing is expected and nothing is unexpected and nothing stirs me but, I'm not splitting, those are just words on my skin and on my cheeks and on my heart and I'm still and I'm still and I'm still ** Melanie Maggard is a flash and poetic prose writer who loves dribbles and drabbles. She has published in Cotton Xenomorph, Ghost Parachute, X-R-A-Y Magazine, Peatsmoke Journal, The Dribble Drabble Review, Five Minute Lit, and others. She can be found online at www.melaniemaggard.com and @WriterMMaggard. |
