FEATURE: The Poetry of Melissa Shepherd

Sonnet for a Gravestone
Not for nothing would I kiss your chloral
corpse, grandmother—panic-flung near Fresh Kills
(before that dump of dumps went pastoral),
poisonous sauerkraut, pure German swill

spoiling the family plot for flowers.
You still bubble trouble, you deathless witch,
through spider veins and twisted genes, glower
of vinegar steam, blood of oily pitch.

You eat what tender weeds might stanch the flow
of our inheritance: your violent streaks.
What can I do but spit on every row
of injury you till, tamp down the reek?

Not for nothing is my love black and blue,
my lips primed for moving ground and sinew.

—

post apocalypse
I leave the city and walk north
along the Hudson you never go
south in times like these I walk
for six days and see no one
I suck on coffee beans and kick over cairns
the house is untouched when I get there the woods
undisturbed I throw my boots
through the window I pull the sheets
from the beds I empty the pantry into the bath
and stick my head in if I scream
I don’t hear it
it doesn’t rain but there are mosquitos
I see our neighbor picking dandelion so I
go to him I won’t tell you how
I forget I forget I have a body
and a mind but I am not
my body or my mind like the guru said I climb
the ridge to where the first trees died to where
the bluestone caved like someplace called
Niagara Falls I scrape at something
called moss with something called fingernails
I drop all named things in the widening hole
you me home the children the proper paperwork
the woman at the last gate wailing
open open open

—

Claim to Fame
Moonfall
vanishing town
population: lost count.

Downhill
proving ground
for other places’

big ideas—
their waste materials
swilling Moonfall’s

air and fields
no matter how many
tunnels

the town leaders build.
Little left
for anyone to do

but meet disease—
the foul seep
from basements

making homes cave
and residents
sink in their beds

with damp prayers
to powders and pills.
Waste

the only business
and killing them
and killing their children—

Moon after Moon
dropped at the mouth
of a sewer, facing

death,
a bigger idea than any
born elsewhere.

—

Sara of Munich
After the Law on the Alteration of Family and Personal Names, which, in 1938,
compelled all German Jews with “non-Jewish” first names to take a second given name, either Sara or Israel.

Muse of the movement
that made her name.

Born Helga or Edith
or any good German name

before she was Sara,
favorite subject

of the government.
A school of amateurs

making a splash
in the town square,

their killer graphics
hanging everywhere.

A bold drape,
how Sara became Sara

and her husband Israel
and her son Israel

and every woman Sara
and every man Israel

who didn’t fit the new
aesthetic. What Sara saw

as second-rate
Expressionism

no matter how it sold
as realism.

More and more
the work showed,

florid brushstrokes

stolen from other eras,

as Sara would note
in a book published

before her death—
two shots in the chest

after the rounds on Israel
and Israel were spent—

a glossy doorstop
called Art for Art’s Sake.

Derivative at best, she said.
Exhibit A, her likeness

on the book’s cover.
The Scream-inspired portrait

where she held her face
in her hands

and a primitive wave
flowed behind her,

almost childlike
if not for the fear

it inspired. The black-
hole mouth and eyes

she never recognized
as her own.

Poet’s Statement

My work is rooted in a sense of place—whether imagined, remembered, or experienced in real time. Typically a poem begins for me with a cinematic scene in my head. I try to bring it to the page so it can take on fuller dimension, so I can flesh out both narrative and lyrical elements. I’m always seeking connection with the reader in my poems; often addressing them to a specific person but hoping to leave space for anyone to take part. I’m interested in how, together, we can
use poetry to reckon with personal and cultural inheritance, and find points of transformation. The harder a place is to navigate, the more I tend to lean on sound play and structure to manage it.

Melissa Shepherd is an arts advocate and emerging poet who lives in Hoboken, NJ. She will receive an MFA in poetry from the Naslund-Mann School of Writing at Spalding University later this May and just completed her first book of poetry, Keys to the Emptying House. www.melissashepherd.info