Melissa Dickson Blackburn
On Spilling the Salt
…a new constellation towards which I whisper your name. - R.T. Smith
I don't care for love poems. They don't
make it into contemporary anthologies, do they?
We write of minerals and moths, of things defined
transformed. We write of humble shapes
as they shift from candle to bulb to star
and back to grain of salt, hard and measurable, sharp
against the skin. We write of buttons and bicycles,
of snowmen and popcorn and parachutes.
But grant me one last constellation of despair
and longing, a point in the night sky
where words spill kosher and coarse and obvious.
Bio
Melissa Dickson Blackburn is a mother, marketing executive, and MFA student of poetry at Converse College. Her work has previously appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Caesura, Southern Women's Review, The Driftwood Review, Birmingham Arts Journal, Breadcrumb Scabs and Glass, A Journal of Poetry. She holds an MFA in Painting from the School of Visual Arts, 1995. In 1992, she received a BFA in painting from Auburn University where she was a recipient of the Academy of American Poets Award. Her first collection, Cameo, is forthcoming in January 2011 from New Plains Press.