Tag: villanelle

Three Poems by Melissa Fite Johnson

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Estranged Villanelle

For forty years, I shared only the good—
my mother and I in a booth every Thursday,
long talks that avoided my childhood

memories. I left out the times she stood,
threatened to walk out, so I’d beg her to stay.
For forty years, I shared only the good—

antiquing in a charming neighborhood,
new bakery, bridal shower, Sunday matinee.
Long talks that pretended my childhood

didn’t color outside the lines of my baby book.
Why did I participate in her little stage play?
For forty years, I shared only the good,

unspoken agreement that some things should
be private. With friends I knew what to say,
long talks that amended my childhood.

Everyone loved my mother. Who would
believe this other side of her, anyway?
So for forty years, I shared only the good,
even with myself. I discounted my childhood.

*

Preexisting Conditions

My brother wouldn’t get the vaccine.
My mother’s partner wouldn’t let her see my brother.
My mother begged my husband and me to fix it.

We tried. Three years of this.

My brother said big pharma.
My mother’s partner uninvited us from his life.
My mother canceled Christmas but still texted

How about a phone call on Christmas to your mother?

I got the text in the car, passenger seat.
I pressed my hand flat against the cold window.
I knew I would never call my mother again.

My husband and I were driving to the zoo,
a pandemic tradition we kept when the world returned.
Every night-disappeared tree now outlined in color,
a reverse silhouette. The familiar made strange.
The sloth’s head on backwards. The owl upside down.

*

Am I the Asshole

I ask my husband, I ask my best friend. They say no.
I say I’m burning it all down. They say I’m cutting the rot.
I say this is a poem and it’s all clichés so far. They say
nothing because now I’m alone, writing this poem.

My mother’s frown. My brother saying I was her little doll.
My classroom ceiling collapsing after reporting a leak for a year.
My mother taught me politeness and quiet. She taught
my brother entitlement and demands. It scares me

how impolite I’m being, not talking to my mother or brother,
quitting my job. Writing this poem. I should smile
and sip tea. I should break cookies into fourths
so it takes half a week to eat one fucking cookie. I should

tell the therapist it’s fine, I don’t remember either.
I should forgive my mother because I should not remember.

*

Melissa Fite Johnson is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Midlife Abecedarian (Riot in Your Throat, 2024). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Pleiades, The Southern Review, and elsewhere, and has received a special mention for the Pushcart Prize. Melissa, a high school English teacher, is a poetry editor for The Weight, a journal for high school students, and Porcupine Lit, a journal by and for teachers. She and her husband live with their dogs in Lawrence, KS.

Two Poems by Christiana Doucette

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Affirmations of the Powerless: A Villanelle after Helene

We are ok. We are alive.
The streets are full of trees and wires.
We have a house. We sleep inside.

The autumn trees that still survive
drop leaves instead of limbs. Mud’s mires
dry, ok. We are alive.

Without power we contrive
hot meals: pizzas baked right on the fire.
We have a yard. We eat outside.

I wonder on the morning drive
which houses still have occupiers.
Which are ok? Which still hold lives?

At the airport when I arrive
a Lake Lure guard justifies
“I have a house to sleep inside,

my neighbors don’t.” She confides.
We repeat our mollifiers.
“We are ok. We are alive.
We have a house to live inside.”

*

Stand of Birches

There’s an air of Eden in the Autumn,
a gold-gilded glow of sun through leaves.
The paper trees whisper presence
as we tread the thin red path between them.
Baby hands reach toward brilliant blue.
It peeks through the cathedral arches
and she coos, and tries to catch light columns
leaning between the trees from the stained glass roof.
She has not known the fall. The way the leaves
brown and crumble, soiling the forest floor
covering caterpillar chrysalises where
crawling bellies unmake themselves,
to build wings from nature’s sweetness.
She only knows summer’s verdant green
and now the sheen of all earth shimmering.

*

Christiana Doucette builds miniatures, because details create scenes. She brings that attention to her verse. As 2024 Kay Yoder Scholarship for History recipient and a judge for San Diego Writer’s Festival, her poetry has been performed on NPR. Leslie Zampetti represents her. You can find some of her recent poetry in Rattle Poet’s Respond, County Lines, and Wild Peach.