Two Poems by Melissa Stein

Ardor

When we woke up the roses
had all been trampled, blowsy
froth and armored stalks,

and we stood there in
the weighted morning air
wringing our hands. Nevertheless

there was something magnetic
in the slightly wavering complexion
of where they once stood,

in the ground now ornamented
with expensively calibrated
color crushed and shredded.

Oh to borrow for just an hour
in this tediously agnostic
circumambulation such divine

conviction: to move through
this world as a pillar of fire,
an immaculate decimation—

Vows

He didn’t invite me to the wedding.
Am I some kind of ghost? A few roses
blown open. People kept trooping back
and forth in downpour to view
the thorny stalks. I saw the photos.
Am I shameful? Even from far away
you can tell someone’s age by how her body
moves. What bird by the steadiness
of its wings. Some trees are simply
more picturesque. Some days
I’m a regret machine. Why
are children always running, is there
so very much to get to? You terrify
the moments. You waste them like this.
And behind walls doors and screens,
everyone you’ve ever lost
is repeating marriage vows.

Melissa Stein is the author of the poetry collection Rough Honey, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, and her second book will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2018. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, and others, and she’s received fellowships from the NEA, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony. She is a freelance editor in San Francisco.