Landscape with Clinic and Oracle by Lynn Melnick

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend September 22, 2016   Landscape with Clinic and Oracle   Lynn Melnick

Maybe you’re not the featherweight champ of all the cutthroat combat sports   (fifteen and pregnant again)   but you’d convert your ring corner into a slaughterhouse   before you’d inquire after human kindness.     In the humdrum flare outside the clinic you wait for a ride, feel the spill at the tipping point   trickle down your inner thigh as you bask in the post-industrial particulate   on your skin, ash into a jasmine pot’s bituminous anchorage   so tacky it glows in a habitat that spent your body long before it finished growing.            Lynn! they lied to you   don’t you know? Your womb will be the first thing to heal.   What you smell is pleasure, not the rot of the thing amid the waste.   You will have babies. You will write poems about flowers that turn on in darkness.            Copyright © 2016 Lynn Melnick. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “I’ve written this scene once before, in prose, but telling it in poetry felt at once more private and more expansive. This poem is for my daughters (to read when they are a bit older).” —Lynn Melnick   Lynn Melnick is the author of If I Should Say I Have Hope (YesYes Books, 2012). She teaches at the 92nd Street Y and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Poetry by Melnick   If I Should Say I Have Hope (YesYes Books, 2012)  "How I Am" by Jason Shinder "You are perfect for me" by Rebecca Wolff "Negotiations" by Rae Armantrout Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038