Like Mine

I promise
I didn’t know
you were there.
no one ever told me,
though I asked
twice.
twice.

maybe you were
huddled there, trembling
and glistening
like a fresh dewdrop
inside me.

(once,
I thought I heard you
whisper something
in a language
I didn’t know
I spoke.
once,
when night painted my eyelids,
I thought I saw you.
and you had hair
like a bright flame.)

but then again,
maybe you weren’t.
aren’t. never.

I contemplate
this surprising brilliant spurt,
those hundred vermillion drops
speckled delicately,
like so many fallen leaves,
across the white basin—

eventually
they could have become
you.

when it is daylight,
I imagine you with dark hair,
like his. blue eyes,
like mine.



I Saw The Earth Curve.

I did;
it burned like fire;
I was only half-asleep.

I saw the horizon bend.

from my precarious perch
on the edge of the stratosphere,
the sun was melting,
gold in a furnace,
and slipping down the
inclined horizon like
lava, coating the sides
of the mountain, the
earth. and the sky

glowed orange, yellow,
pink, pale, like a desert
or the sea, blue.

they said I was above Italy,
but I was in the sky, and
the sky belongs to Africa.



Lonesome

as a long pale bed
glowing like moonlight
under a window that is being
pelted and smeared silver
by forlorn angry raindrops.
And the wind is heaving the trembling trees
while a tiny frightened star peeks out
of the cloud-ridden purple Bangkok sky
and cries.

But child, you’ve never been to Bangkok.

Shut up. This is not so much about
where I haven’t been as it is
about where I have been.

Regardless, you’ve never been there.

And neither have you. So
for all you know, I’m right
about the way leaves shaped like valentines
are thrust from their comfortable perches
by teardrops that echo like
deep rain in stone corridors.


Melissa Lambert is a prevention education specialist with an abuse prevention and treatment facility by day, a freelance writer and translator by night.