String Theory

Crank the star-making machine,
the earth gives birth tonight.

Violins smash against granite mountains
as shards of oak splinter the wind like tiny
bayonets.

Then the strings are oiled down with pomegranate seeds

and stretched along latitudes, weaving metallic veins
while the dirt shrieks,

a bow scraping A sharp, until the entire horizon
of mustard fog is wrapped in chords.

Next the strings, pulled taut, are plucked,
the reverberations casting cataclysmic

notes into the seafoam, giving agony its weight
and dimension its purple hue. The fission

of this dove-sound sends lichens soaring through the
atmosphere and song becomes city,

cloud welcomes sky, man meets pathology. Enter
the bromides. Meanwhile, we lay back on rickety

green lawn chairs, aviator shades on, kicking
toadstools
in the dirt and watching it all go down
with a pack of smokes,
puffing away.

The Unspoiled Shore

Peeling back the ripe skin of noontime
sun, she sifts with the breakers

and clacks in the gull’s throat.
Open, and closed. She is vastness,

the wordless space between lightning
striking, the delicate stretch of blue-eye.

She is a single point of light, directed and
exact, sand-grain within sand-grain. Open,

closed. As he is vast, as he is a single
point of light. The vastness holds everything,

the wind, seasalt and stingrays.
The single point of light holds everything

in the expansive, murmuring space
we make home for ourselves,
our misdeeds and latent desires,
our inkling to forgive and let go.

May we sift and break softly,
together,
then apart.

Melissa Carroll is a poet, writer and lover of life from Tampa, Florida, where she currently works as a copywriter to save up for graduate school. Her work has appeared in Feile-Festa, and in 2005 and 2006 she won 1st place for poetry in the University of Tampa's literary journal, Quilt. She also practices Reiki, spends time in nature and loves what words can do.

Email: Melissa Carroll

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