Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
A Story
Pre-Raphaelite hair, a little black dress
and fuck-me pumps, my poems drawing
actors, dancers, painters to my Village digs,
books, opera tickets, the Met.
Someone else is living the life I thought I’d get.
When I whistle, a white horse
in Central Park lifts its head, wickering.
I lie down like Nebucadnezzer to graze.
My lips kissing a subway grate
five hundred miles away, years too late,
a forelock whisks my cheek.
Melissa Green is the author of three collections of poems, The Squanicook Eclogues (W. W. Norton & Co.), Fifty-Two (Arrowsmith Press), and most recently Magpiety: New and Selected Poems (Arrowsmith), and two memoirs, Color Is the Suffering of Light (Norton) and The Linen Way (Rosa Mira Books). She has received the Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Little Star, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. She lives in Winthrop, Massachusetts. (updated 10/2016)
Read Sumita Chakraborty’s interview with Melissa Green at The Los Angeles Review of Books.