Melinda Coppola

twenty four may | from the inside out

Melinda Coppola

twenty four may | from the inside out

A 2022 Story

  There was a little stream—more of a rivulet, really—that dribbled and dripped and murmured along through a swath of untamed land.  Many moons and suns cast their light upon her waters as she found her way around boulders and hills and the wide trunks of venerable trees. She was free of any precepts that […]

April is….on Autism, Art, and Friendly Commerce

APRIL IS… As you may know, April is Autism Awareness Month. It’s also National Card and Letter Writing Month. Please allow me to make things more interesting by combining the two! Bink paints once a week, usually working on two canvases at a time. I also dabble in paints and colored pencils, with a nod […]

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 […]

Gifts and Visitations

It’s been just over a month since my dear friend and soul sister Marina died, after a quick and nasty tussle with appendiceal cancer. She visits my consciousness daily, in ways both fleeting and substantial. We talked a lot about the afterlife in her last months. She told me clearly that, when she visits me […]

The Wisdom of Clouds

“ You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather.” Pema Chodron CIRRUS You are wisp, feet rarely touching dirt. Your gaze cannot be met. They call it lazy eye, but we know better. How could anyone expect you to hone a vision when you straddle a few different dimensions most of the time? […]

Communicable

PROPAGATION I’ve taken to humming in the produce section while caressing the plums, sneaking sniffs of the cilantro, eyeing the lemons, audacious in their yellowry. It’s a low, soothing thing, the thrum of air over vocal chords, nearly a buzz, and I am almost a bumblebee, hovering over color, circling the end caps as I […]

My Daughter, the Foodie

Bink loves food. In fact, her relationship with it goes far beyond what tastes good and satisfies her hunger. She loves looking at cookbooks, finding recipes on the computer, and watching cooking shows. The painting subject she selects for her weekly art class is often something edible. The paintings on our walls at home, and […]

Dreamed some dreams

“A DREAM NOT INTERPRETED IS LIKE A LETTER NOT READ.” — The Talmud Last was a night of serial dreams, each building on the tangled mysteries of the one before. There was big sky, and journeying. There was an impossibly tiny stream and a dusty, broad road that earns the title of a trespass, as […]

Rocking the cosmic swirl

Rocking It comforts me to know the old couple across the street just celebrated fifty years in the same house. Fifty together years with the home they perhaps chose to be new in together, a threesome of sorts, their bodies joining brick and hardened earth settling and cracking and pressing together, adding more spackle and […]

Returning to Autismville

  Good day! Below, the second of three of my poems that are eligible for the Readers Choice Award over at Songs of Eretz.  Here is the poem, along with the Editor’s words and poets notes from the journal: Editor’s Note:  Nominees for the Songs of Eretz Readers Choice Award have been or will be […]