Melissa Eleftherion
Invasive Species
Suspicion of a hunger queen
Arranged as a glittering bore
The these the sea she;
In tomb language
Wretched her seawall whispered
Ugly.
Sea the hand she with
Gleam standing.
To be her;
All you who laughed
The quick dark who up sea vivid she slaps
Ancient triumph at last
(Erasure poem. Source Text: Rice, Anne. “Alexandria”. Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2017.)
Twenty-Ninth Suture
How about we
call in sick today
trauma
paperwork
exhausting
like
eye contact
let’s
kick and scream in the pleasure domes of
Xanadu
(Remixed poem. Source text: McGuire, Seanan. Indexing, pg. 248. 47North, 2013)
Apatite
i am misleading
indistinct, variable
brown to pink to clear
lustrous, vitreous to the dullest
little brittle fracture
mostly transparent
then opaque
i’m colorless in that
i’m a spectrum
“i contain multitudes”
by turns white i’m gray
i’m a yellowish green
comprised by all
these valuable radiances
I’m my own supergroup
So various I shine - a series of related minerals
The Greeks call me deceptive
But I decode their pyramidal system
i diaphanate like RoyGBiv
Moody af
I’m all hardness - sometimes they say dull
My colloform habit
No visible crystalline affinities
Comprised of calcium phosphorous hydrogen chlorine oxygen fluorine
I’m “what a girl wants what a girl needs”
Sharp-tongued and limber enough to keep em forever on their toes
A conchoidal fracture developed in the breath of witness
Melissa Eleftherion is a writer, librarian, and a visual artist. She is the author of field guide to autobiography (The Operating System, 2018), & six chapbooks: huminsect (dancing girl press, 2013), prism maps (Dusie, 2014), Pigtail Duty (dancing girl press, 2015), the leaves the leaves (poems-for-all, 2017), green glass asterisms (poems-for-all, 2017), and little ditch (above/ground press, 2018). Founder of the Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange for San Francisco State University, Melissa now lives in Mendocino County where she manages the Ukiah Library, teaches creative writing, and curates the LOBA Reading Series. Recent work is available at www.apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.