#melissa stein

[nomorechoirs]

fr. “Lemon and cedar” by Melissa Stein

[lifeinpoetry]

oh / I want something so beautiful I forget my life.

Melissa Stein, from “Aquarium,” Rough Honey

[bostonpoetryslam]

What is so pure as grief? A wreck set sail just to be wrecked again. To lose what's lost—it's all born lost and we just fetch it for a little while, a dandelion span, a quarter-note. Each day an envelope gummed shut with honey and mud.

Melissa Stein, “Lemon and cedar,” from Terrible Blooms

[tiaochan]

Each want sired want and I was drowning in it— but kept my head just enough above the choking to choke more.

Melissa Stein, from “How I”, Terrible Blooms

[alliwanttodoiscollectpoetry]

Anthem ~ Melissa Stein

We were all in love but didn’t know it. We were all in love continually. Bless our little hearts, smoking and drinking and wrecking things. Bless our shameless shame. We were loud, invincible. We were tough as rails. We stole street signs and knocked over bins. Ripped the boards off boarded-up stuff. Slept in towers filled with pigeon shit and fluff. We kicked beer bottles down cobbled lanes. Tires and chains. Chains and wheels and skin. The world was always ending and we the inventors of everything.

[rabbit-light]

Hive

In the night, fear's stepchild: all hail the ticking brain. And ash in the fireplace and in the stove. What am I doing with these old-woman hands? They don't belong to me.

There was one perfect moment of détente where you called me the love of your life but you were stoned and possibly on pills. Your touch, iambic, when we met and the rest, sheeted mirrors and grief

Next door they're perpetually building a house of schadenfreude and light. They're draping it in butter-yellow paint. The bees will take up residence. There's honey in the paint.

Melissa Stein

[fluttering-slips]

Ardor

When we woke up the roses had all been trampled, blowsy froth and armored stalks,

and we stood there in the weighted morning air wringing our hands. Nevertheless

there was something magnetic in the slightly wavering complexion of where they once stood,

in the ground now ornamented with expensively calibrated color crushed and shredded.

Oh to borrow for just an hour in this tediously agnostic circumambulation such divine

conviction: to move through this world as a pillar of fire, an immaculate decimation—

Melissa Stein

[mortalpractice]

Some days I’m a regret machine.

Melissa Stein, from “Vows,” Terrible Blooms