Melissa Holm Shoemake
Melissa Holm Shoemake lives in Atlanta, GA with her husband and two sons where she works in college administration at Emory University. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Mississippi and her poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies including The Southern Humanities Review, The Shore, Harpur Palate, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology and Best New Poets 2024. Her chapbook, Ab.Sin.The. is available from Dancing Girl Press.
Winter Solstice: The Wild Hunt
I.
On the furthest axis tilt from the sun
my sister was born
in the liminal space between seasons.
On this darkest night our ancestors celebrated
a war in the sky, the sifting cosmos
a frail guard against the ghostly procession
of Odin’s gathering of the undead for Valhalla.
The six hooves of his horse clamber
in shadows over the living.
Clouds betray their unseen shapes
while indoors hives of humans
warm around the rune inscribed
yule log in celebration of the celestial battle,
their drunken bellows stitching
itself within the biting winds.
II.
At the end of her life,
she swallowed one storm
and then another.
She wore an unseen iron maiden
and the weight of a demon.
Each day was an invisible war,
the wild hunt for a chemical
craving. She ransacked her body
to numb a burning
and when the preferred prey
of opioids eluded her
it was crushed, strawed Benadryl’s,
Benzos, cut-capped whipped
cream, vodka and pleading to a god
in the sky she can’t see,
pleading to rest in the thin
euphoric moment just before
the hunter’s shot.
