Melody Wilson
Melody Wilson is a pushcart nominated poet whose poems appear in Catamaran, Watershed, VerseDaily, West Trade Review, Emerson Review, Crab Creek Review, and elsewhere and her manuscript Madre Dura was a finalist for the Catamaran Prize and the Louisville Review National Poetry Prize. She received her MFA from Pacific University. Find more of her work at melodywilson.com.
All Mothers Are Mythologies
feathery fables with tongues.
Some glide on glassy ponds,
a cygnet beneath each wing.
Others deposit one blue egg
on its father’s feet and migrate
away. Mine was a condor,
subsisted on carrion. I didn’t know
she teetered between brilliant
and extinct until she hoisted me
to my grandmother’s casket,
insisted, kiss her goodbye.
I couldn’t yet measure
the distances of death,
but tasted the grief gurgling
in my mother’s unbeautiful throat.
Even the shade of a wingspan like that
is fleeting. It’s best to swallow whole
whatever comes from her mouth.
