Melanie Perish
After Weeks of Smoke
The sky returns. Not sooty haze,
not smudge, but cobalt, steel blue,
or blue-black silk the color of shadow
on new snow. Clouds
buffer each other in rolled rows.
Wind – the temperature
of cooled coffee – touches
the back of my neck like the lover
I want again and now. Rain
after months of aching.
Sagebrush steeped in dark
releases its scent.
The coyote drinks
where the driveway
dips. She doesn’t look up
and I do not move
in the truce the sky brought.
Melanie Perish’s poems have appeared in Sinister Wisdom, Caesura, Third Street Review, The Raven’s Nest, Calyx, Sequestrum, Persimmon Tree, and other online or small press publications. Her poems are featured on the Nevada Humanities Heart to Heart and Nevadan to Nevadan websites. Passions & Gratitudes (Black Rock Press, 2011) and The Fishing Poems (Chapbook, Meridian Press, 2017) are current collections. Foreign Voices, Native Tongues (Single Wing Press, 2021) is her newest. She owes a major debt to other poets with whom she exchanges work and critiques. She learned from Audre Lorde that “Writing is solitary, but thinking is collective.” Melanie believes reading makes you beautiful.
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