Melinda Coppola

twenty four may | from the inside out

Melinda Coppola

twenty four may | from the inside out

Pippi

  For the most part, my childhood nourished my creativity and sense of wonder. I feel so fortunate to have come up in a time before cell phones and social media. My knowledge of screens was limited to our old black and white TV set and the occasional movie outing. Children’s literature was a treasured […]

Folliculi, Follicula

TEND and SAVOR “Why the hair is attached to the head it will not come out please respond to me in a video.” These were the first words Bink communicated to me today, shortly after she got up.  I’ve answered this question—one of about six in the current sequence that makes up part of my […]

Me and My Shadow Go to Market

It is May 2020, still early in The Covid Times. We take ourselves to the market, by which I mean our whole selves, me in my layers of self-consciousness— the run of the mill kind that most of us don without thought— she baring all, as usual: no pretense, nothing to hide. The market rule […]

Per Annum

Every year, now, around my birthday, I feel a tug to write something, employing words to mark the privilege of completing another ride around the sun. This year’s efforts came in the form of a love letter to my life. Here, below, is an edited version, and though it’s all between me and me, I […]

Your Repose

I’m pleased to share this poem, which made its debut yesterday, in the Songs of Eretz Poetry Journal. I’ve included my poet’s notes, which that particular editor requires, as well as his comments. I’m grateful to add another poem to my list of published  work. I’m also thankful for the support of my dear readers! […]

Barry of the Wind

Have you ever dreamed someone alive again, someone long dead, whose memory visits rarely? Have you seen the watery shine of his eyes, smelled the shampoo lingering in her hair? I’m talking about a dream SO real, you feel like you’ve stepped over the line between this reality and another, but your feet are firmly […]

7 AM, Redux

Dear Reader, I’m so pleased to share my first of three finalist poems from the Songs of Eretz poetry contest. Though I didn’t win first place this year, each finalist poem is eligible for the Reader’s Choice Award. Steve Wittenburg Gordon, the Editor of Songs of Eretz, published the poem and the following commentary on […]

Tenure

I offer you gifts of words newly strung and tender, strong and sometimes proud, words that are still humming with the cadence of my beating heart from which poems burst forth onto the page. I call them my poems, but we both know this is folly. The purled words don’t belong to me any more […]

Inner Child Remembers

Young Melinda Coppola

Before The Tax that adolescence imposes on body, mind, and spirit, probably in that order, there were hearty chunks of time that were some sort of unencumbered. Inner Child remembers discovering the fairies living well in tall flowers near the sandbox. How I loved to honor them, grabbing kid-sized chubby handfuls of sand and running […]

Autographing Autumn

I was walking, first field– verdant, moist , glorious carpet of greens, and the woods edged closer, with a beckoning trail, and then the floor was pine needles, punctuated with wily old roots in no pattern whatsoever. Sky was rarified blue, bluer, an artist’s glad canvas, background perfection to the leaves! Yellow and orange, rusty […]