When I am Ash

To hear me read this post, click below.

Hello you!

I’ve had a new poem published in the inaugural issue of Harrow House Journal.

This was one of the rare pieces that arrived almost completely formed and slid easily out of my heart onto the page. “When my warm flesh” is for my life partner and love, Superguy. 

When my warm flesh

transmutes to ashes
and I’m scattered—
half in New Hampshire forest
in thanks for the pine-needled floor,
half in Cape Cod waters
to enrich the mollusks mud flats—
please gather these things:

my journals,
on the first shelf
under the window in the study—
the ones I don’t want read.

From the upper drawer
in our shared bureau,
take the opossum earrings
you gave me the second spring
I spent swooning over
their nocturnal visits to our deck.

Grab a lip balm—
the honey kind I was addicted to,
told you to apply hourly
If I were ever in a coma
or lost use of my hands.

Find the driftwood
with the heart-shaped middle
not officially for sale, yet gifted
to me by a woman at a craft fair
because I was the first to notice it.

Bury these things somewhere beautiful
we never got to see together,
maybe where water and land kiss,
or in the armpit of a wild rock formation
in the Utah desert you loved
and said I would gush poetry over
when we finally made it there one day.

One day didn’t come.
It never does,
and we couldn’t admit
our bucket lists, too long,
would be half full
when we died.

Oh, Love,
the fruit of our sweet life
rounded my belly in my dusk years.

Take great care with our daughter,
and know I was sated,
that even the grueling days
held verse—
stanzas so ripe
I was often drunk on them.

Thanks so much for reading!

–Melinda Coppola

Photo by Anukrati Omar on Unsplash