Melody S. Gee
And So More*
Begin with before you
are made. Fat gold
watch tinkered
together, overwound.
A blossom becomes when
the tree says, when air says.
The nectar before the bee
before the eager comb:
who are all these materials?
Your early cells would
be anything. Some directive
says heart and not
so the cells divide, each
split extinguishes lip, vessel,
iris possibilities to build
the heart’s walls.
How is this construction?
When the light came away
from darkness, the darkness
did not ease. Neither the sea
when land slouched up.
And so on. And so more.
And on what day was your hunger
cleaved from thirst, was wailing
formed in your liquid lungs?
* The first stanza takes a line from Sylvia Plath’s “Morning Song.” (Back to top)
Melody S. Gee is the author of The Dead in Daylight (2016, Cooper Dillon Books) and Each Crumbling House (Perugia Press, 2010) and is a Kundiman poetry and fiction fellow. Her essays and poetry appear in Commonweal Magazine, Blood Orange Review, Ruminate, and Slippery Elm. She is a freelance writer and editor living in St. Louis, MO. • Photo by Margarita Corporan