Melinda Coppola

twenty four may | from the inside out

Melinda Coppola

twenty four may | from the inside out

Temporal Tryst

Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero, meaning “seize the day while trusting as little as possible on what tomorrow might bring”. Tomorrow In a daytime dream, the kind of interlude I once slipped into and out of as easily as frog to pond, and as shiny, with the slick lubricant of youth, I met some […]

Perhaps his name is Three Dollar Bill

The Emissary To the man on Pleasant Street You pace the same stretch of sidewalk every morning, purposefully, in one direction, then turning abruptly to traverse the same piece of asphalt back to an invisible starting point, ovalling this way over and over, rain or shine, in every season. Your arms flail as if conducting […]

Hearing the Ocean in a Tea Cup ( again)

The Sea, the Sea I met the Pacific in 1982, she in her blue-green majesty, and I, in perpetual denim, my words untested and eyes not yet jaded. For twelve months, hundreds of days, I lived so close I could sense her depths by the movement of fine hairs on my forearms, her salt with […]

Tender

Tender. Unless I am speaking of meat, which I mostly don’t, the very word owns its ness, as in, what is tender evokes tenderness, and what calls that forth in me is that which I am drawn towards, or s/he whom I draw close, or want to. Draw close,touch, be connected with, and to— it’s […]

Hmmm. I thought I put me down right there

Here is Where All day the wind blew the trees against the house, and my old ears heard the hearty breeze as a roaring river, the kind that swells in spring, the kind that swallows half made nests the wind shakes from the breast of tight bushes and tosses carelessly towards the sky. Inside I […]

Dear Future Roadmaker

It’s still April, still Autism Awareness month. I’m thinking, as I so often do, of all the people I have met on my journey of raising a daughter with special needs. There have been some wonderful teachers and some exceptional therapists (physical, occupational, speech and language, to name a few). There have been good hearted […]

Inch by Inch

Dear small band of loyal readers, I’m pleased to share that my poem, Reset, has placed second in the Light of the Stars poetry contest sponsored by Lone Stars magazine, and appears in the Spring 2019 issue. Printed literary journals are becoming less common. More and more of them publish exclusively online, which is, of course, […]

Our small eyes

Perchance Perhaps nothing begins or ends, not exactly. The field mouse knows the tall grass to be her world. We say morning comes, and yet it is always somewhere, just not in the very front of our small eyes. The trees are wise. They know everything cycles, seed to sapling, strong trunk reaches skyward,, and […]

To Sleep, Perchance to Wake and See the Stars

Bink does not sleep solidly through the night, ever. When she was younger it was especially challenging, because she’d wake up and need me to be right there with her, and she’d often be up for hours. Sometimes, after waking at 1 or 2 am, she’d stay up the rest of the night and all […]

Love is a Rendering

Love is a Rendering   Telling you how I love you is like trying to find things that haven’t been said about the ocean. My hands prefer to paint it— affection, water— sweeping, striped backgrounds, turquoise and deep salient greens, silvery whites frosting every liquid peak, and there’s the sky hovering above the seas like […]