Poetry: Melissa Studdard

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Supplies I Will Require Before Seriously Considering the Job

*Forthcoming in Dear Selection Committee (JackLeg Press, May 2022)

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Family Tree

My mother was a lake
………… full of water lilies,

my father was a bridge
………… between the bardo

and heaven. He tossed me
………… to his shoulders

for the parade of grandparents
………… at night: Orion

and Cassiopeia, Gemini and Auriga.
………… Once we saw a cousin

shoot from the ground beside
………… a circle of pines. Geyser,

Mother said, tossing a silver
………… carp into the air. When

I was old enough, I asked them
………… the story of my birth,

and they each handed me a singing
………… sparrow the color of my hair.

*Originally Published in Pirene’s Fountain (Glass Lyre Press)
*Forthcoming in Dear Selection Committee (JackLeg Press, May 2022)

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Like Shining from Shook Foil

You’re in a valley
and flying. You know a thousand
other words for behold,
a hundred thousand for dapple-dale.
Below, a century begins and ends
and no one remembers the details.
You mistake a sheep’s sigh
for sadness and fall in love
with the sound of cloud emanating from lungs.
You mistake a horse’s whinny for winter
and stop for a hundred years to build and stoke
a fire to keep the horse warm.
You are a bird,
no,
thirty birds,
no,
a thousand. Your wings
flame to flight—arching and lifting,
wimpling and waving. Soon
the movement lifts you
and you are one again with the wonder
of dappled light. You coax
honey from a topaz stone
and feed it to a cloud. Love will
break you
into the gift of your life.
Give it
to everyone you meet.
There’s no right or wrong here,
only warmth
rushing from you
like embers to the wind—

*Previously published in Like a Bird With a Thousand Wings (Saint Julian Press)
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Om

She sent us flowers without a card,
God did—that trickster soul.
It must have been a sound that started it all,
and she’s still out there somewhere, laughing
while we seek directions, or direction,
while we, the addressees, search for an addresser,
while we sort and sift and categorize and collect,
divide, classify and analyze. Our refrigerators hum to us,
and heaven knows the bugs make merry at night.
Once I even saw yellow hum
when I imagined Van Gogh stroking its thick,
vibrancy onto the page.
That yellow was anything but hum-drum.
I swear, I felt it on the roof of my mouth
and at the back of my throat,
a yogic ritual or some sort of Tantric stunt.
Even deep in my chest, yes, I felt the hum.
And in the other room—the clothes in the washer,
round and round they went, a spinning universe,
and next to them, a parallel world, the dryer,
connected by the same outlet,
humming away.
This life is anything but ho-hum,
with all this motion and noise.
Hell, I can hardly hear over the buzz of my phone,
which I have cursed for interference,
which I have indignantly nicknamed,
that silver piece of shit,
which I have threatened to replace (like it cares),
and which was really Om all along.
Washing clothes, I’ve since learned, is an act of prayer.


*From I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast (Saint Julian Press)
* First published in Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature

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BIO

Melissa Studdard is the author of five books, including the poetry collection I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast, the poetry chapbook Like a Bird with a Thousand Wings, and the young adult novel Six Weeks to Yehidah, as well as a forthcoming collection of poems, Dear Selection Committee. Her work has been featured by NPR, PBS, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Houston Matters, and has also appeared in a wide variety of periodicals, such as POETRY, Kenyon Review, Psychology Today, New Ohio Review, Harvard Review, New England Review, and Poets & Writers.

Her book awards include the Forward National Literature Award, the International Book Award, the Kathak Literary Award, the Poiesis Award of Honor International, the Readers’ Favorite Award, and two Pinnacle Book Achievement Awards. She has also received The Penn Review Poetry Prize, Lucille Medwick Memorial Award for a Poem on a Humanitarian Theme from The Poetry Society of America and the Tom Howard Prize from Winning Writers. As well, her works have been listed in Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts’ Best Books of the Year, January Magazine’s Best Children’s Books of the Year, Bustle’s “8 Feminist Poems To Inspire You When The World Is Just Too Much,” and Amazon’s Most Gifted Books.

In addition to writing, Studdard is a past president of the Associated Writing Program’s Women’s Caucus and former executive producer and host of VIDA Voices & Views for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence college and is a professor for the Lone Star College System.