Two Poems by Melissa Strilecki

Rabid Omnivores

Once asked, “What are you made of?”
I said want. I am made of want.
I am on the apps

and I’ve left-swiped my entire city.
I don’t try to equivocate, but sometimes
every word seems to mean

at least two other words.
Six hours away, a gorgeous man
writes dark stories about lonely men

in bars, and says we might as well be
in different dimensions. “Well, then,
there’s a world

where we have an amazing first date.”
He’d like to read that one,
some day. When I say

I fear rejection: In high school,
a boy asked me out
as a prank. The water polo team

watched and laughed. This Fall,
poems fell from me in threes.
I write them to men who don’t read

poems. It used to be
you got a slug of whiskey
and a stick to bite

when they cut off your fucking leg,
and here I am—
felled by my feelings.

*

Another Poem About

I want to be the person who takes
what another can give, and notes the datapoints
to calibrate my own expectations. Instead,
I am whatever this is. I was asked again today
for the poem about my mother.
Not today. I’ve folded away everything
left to say. While I cook for you,
I think how I haven’t done this for someone
since my husband, and I don’t tell you,
so you don’t know. Do I mind
if you go for a run? While the Bolognese
simmers? No. If you stay, I could say something
true. When I cook for you, and you eat
without realizing it’s my heart—
My heart in a fed belly. In knowing
there is not a single person
I would hide you from—maybe
every poem I write
about a man who cannot love me,
is a poem about my mother.

*

Melissa Strilecki has been previously published in Sugar House Review, Fugue, West Trade Review, The Shore, and several others. She lives in Seattle with her two children.