All the cats compass out at night to verify
my homelessness though you can’t
 
expect me to claw for food while most everyone else is sleeping.
I’ll just as soon not eat.
 
xxxxxxI don’t want anyone to keep me.
 
I’m a set of round, ridiculous things.
I talk claptrap in this lush
 
summer land of boondocks
 
(I thumb into somebody’s car into somebody’s car
 
into somebody’s car and then we see if we can prove
that every search for my body ends tragically.
 
xxxxxxIt was a lie about forming art from despair)
 
and you point out plume I don’t care about
 
xxxxxxover the rocks and ruffled around the blood I’ve lost.
 
I am thirteen before I know that ants can nest
in a log, fourteen before I know
 
xxxxxxthat the reproductives have wings.
 
Under stag lights I dance for my dinner.
And everywhere I wander the cats scratch my legs.
 
I can’t stay here. It’s over, it was always over,
there was never going to be a miracle
 
xxxxxxthat would keep me green.
 

___

Lynn Melnick is the author of If I Should Say I Have Hope (YesYes Books, 2012). Her poetry has appeared in BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Guernica, Gulf Coast, jubilat, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and is forthcoming in The New Republic . Her fiction has appeared in Opium and Forklift, Ohio, and she has written essays and book reviews for Boston Review, Coldfront, LA Review of Books, Poetry Daily, and VIDAweb, among others. She grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in Brooklyn.

Met dank aan Joost Baars, die schreef over Lynn Melnick tijdens zijn verblijf in New York.