A Tuesday in My Twenties

I asked the robin nesting
in the bottlebrush tree
if love would find me more easily
if I wore the red scarf.

In that era of wanting,
I’d pluck the morning’s loneliness
like stones from my pockets
to set along the windowsill.

My mother used to arrange shards
of pottery like that to catch the light.
Make your own luck, she would say,
yet the clouds kept shifting.

On a different day, without the scarf,
I tumbled into love at the Elbo Room,
his dark leather jacket cool beneath
my palms on the dance floor.

That was the beginning
of everything—the luck
we made and all the rest
we could do nothing about.

*

Melinda Clemmons’ first full-length manuscript was a finalist for the Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize from Ashland Poetry Press, and a semi-finalist for both the Word Works Washington Prize and the Red Mountain Press Discovery Award. Her poems and stories have appeared in Rust + Moth, Cimarron Review, the Midwest Review, West Trestle Review, Shrew, 300 Days of Sun, and elsewhere. She lives in Oakland, California.