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After the Return from a Visit with Best Friends

Loneliness is a dead star, an empty pond,
the well-dressed bullet in its copper jacket.
We have yet to name the moons of loneliness.
It arrives on a long braid of bird beaks.
Where are their songs?
In my hands, loneliness slices and band-aids
my paper-cut wounds. It is illegal
to accuse loneliness of home invasion.
Butterflies inch through loneliness as caterpillars,
crack their singular chrysalis to let wet wings
dry and fly. I pour salt on the slug of loneliness
and risk poisoning the soil. Loneliness
has no tense, but can create it. Like the hook-up,
loneliness won’t stay the night. Loneliness
sits on the bottom step, afraid of the sand
and the surf. In the heat, loneliness
grows soft as stone fruit.
At the window of loneliness,
I see only my reflection.

—
Melanie Perish’s poems have appeared in Sequestrum, Third Street Review, Calyx, Sinister Wisdom, The Meadow, Persimmon Tree, and other publications. Nevada Humanities has featured her work in two websites: Nevadan to Nevadan (2022) and Double Down Blog (2024). Passions & Gratitudes (Black Rock Press, 2011) and The Fishing Poems (Meridian Press, 2016) are recent. Foreign Voices, Native Tongues (Blurb/Single Wing Press) was released January 2021. She is grateful for the generosity of other poets.

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Have you read these poems:
Ice in My Wine by Brian C. Billings
tonight is another night by Christopher Cleary

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