Melinda Coppola

twenty four may | from the inside out

Melinda Coppola

twenty four may | from the inside out

What’s in a name? More pub cred, musings

Mid-April already?  Time is such a liquid concept. Today, my  already may be your finally. It is already April?  Finally, it is spring.  In February, my finally was louder than my already. Finally, Winter has lifted the frayed ends of her long gray coat and begun her drawn-out egress. I’ve had two more poems published, […]

All This Joy, All This Sorrow

Monday, March 28, morning. It’s snowing as I write this.  Big, fluffy flakes that arrive past the date of our northern hemisphere Spring equinox.  I wonder if they know they won’t accumulate. If they did know, would their especially short lifespan would matter to them?  I suspect not.  Nature cycles despite our self-important desires and […]

A Little Flower

“I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince Hello, First, here’s a sweet daffodil that blossomed outside my door yesterday. A little yellow beacon of hope. It’s been quiet here on […]

I Wish You Knew

In the Garden   Imagine if you will, dear one, dear one and all, that you are sent to manifest something unique and quite vital to the world.  You arrive as rich seeded earth, landing in just the right geographic location to support your eventual yield. The trees and the flowers and the shrubs in […]

Saved

  It is a blessing to find those things that save us in small ways. At the checkout counter a teenaged boy offered to carry groceries for an old couple. They said yes, and I was quietly saved. Last Tuesday, late morning, a brief shaft of early winter sun reached down between sooty clouds, illuminating […]

Everything is a Sign

Of all the offerings, a thousand possible signs, the Spirit Messengers chose poop. A pile of it, excrement of vague animal origins, arranged in a circle too perfect for random, dead center on my front step. And I, lover of beauty, faithful to poetry and all that sings cannot make sense of the leavings; what […]

Integration

It has been almost a month since my mother passed. It wasn’t unexpected. She was old and ill and tired. She wanted to go, was impatient with the way those final months seemed to drag and throw more miseries her way. I was able to mark 60 of my birthdays with her still in the […]

WALKING HER HOME

Adrift. That’s the word that floated into my teary vision as I sat in my car outside the facility my mother has resided in for the past seven years. These after-visit pauses have become part of my ritual in the past few months. There is always someplace else I need to be, fitting in my […]

What Do You Know?

What do we know for sure? I find myself wondering, lately, if we mostly hold the beliefs that suit our ease. For some, self-contempt can provide a kind of familiarity which becomes belief. For others, there is ease in what’s left after all the anger—which is really a mutation of pain—gets bored and leaves, or […]

Conversations with a Ghost

A Dead Friend Speaks Almost a year into my exit from flesh, what we call, when embodied, death, You talk to me, wonder if I help when you struggle and worry, soothe when you rage and grieve. You ask if I’ve retained shape and color, if my long and wild hair, blonde with streaks of […]