MELINDA FREUDENBERGER / 2 POEMS
TENDERNESS
but what we can remember with tenderness we should: we slice through night’s flesh blue and breath
less against the brown pit we hit with a thud on the way in [permit me to write outside of the body
for this one, allow me the language] without
our bodies it was easier to get to know each other—we met in an incorporeal
space we met online the internet was a bottomless
drop and no one knew it yet the desires we kept pummeled
down in our every day life splattered onto screens: chat rooms and messenger with strangers
guaranteed to be older than us the desires that i couldn’t speak about yet for women for sub-
mission for witness were exorcised and i split
open—that’s how it happened for us that’s how we met and we met each night
through it all your voice crept into my ear sweet and smooth someone to to to CAN’T SAY IT
[oh my one safe place there must be something] one dawn i can remember— [just say what it is and it’s yours]
the sun rose wet dripping in pinks to greet the earth and there you were
in my eardrum not much more to say language had begged to get some rest so you sang softly to me and i drifted off
in and out of sleep as if tucked into a moment of my life where time could not reach me out of all
of the people who claimed to know me it was maybe really you who did and there is no
goodness in that no reward just a lifetime of living and no body to account for it
ON BIRDMAN
and did you get what you wanted
jellyfish on a muddy beach, a ball of fire and
smoke
against a water-dark sky, the drums boil the words
down to their essentials: a bang, a tap, one
second of sound. in a life where i clip and stitch
closed my memories as if they are keys to lock and
unlock doors, the movie’s unhinged
flow calls this the speed of life
to expect, asks me
when i became so afraid—i imagine
from this life even so?
and the list is vast. a week off of your funeral, i
look into the blue-blank stare of computer monitors
like crystal balls wondering
if they’re channels to talk to you.
emma stone doesn’t imagine
the window is the answer but then it
is. she looks down then
up—the shot is crystal clear, her big
blue eyes unbelieving but her smile already
ready to. stumb ling
i did. and
smoke i keep my mind on track :: she can leak out at any
minute. touching my body is the only way to appease my
grief-god. it is like i am at the top of a building
sitting on a ledge, daring him to push me
off. sexier, this way. the risk
i have to take to make this body
forget—the men
what did you want?
feet, holding scales in both hands, my provision
my manna from heaven my edward nortons chain
smoking and blowing art out of their mouths into
gray clouds of nothing i am meaning to talk in
circles here i am meaning to state it more
plainly: we fall in love with the body in
movement, even if
reckless, especially in
to call myself beloved
piling up in the gut, the camera pushing from the back
unlocking all of the little doors in the brain and only
can he keep up with the creation of thing he loves by giving up
the self: a shot to the brain (is) what i talk about when i talk about
loss: giving up the self, words that taste blue and
lemon, i would lie to you if i said i didn’t think
about it. maybe i would prefer to lie
to you. so it goes. the snow
to feel myself beloved
slipping beneath my feet. i am the knife
which cuts the negative space in two, a clean
slice from sky to
ground and in between
there is revealed a sunlit room not heaven but filled—;
light is it light is it light within light
i am
looking up for you, ice splintering on my
eye
on the earth
Melinda Freudenberger lives in New York City with her cat, Nancy. She is an MFA Poetry candidate at The New School. Her poems have appeared in bad pony magazine, BARNHOUSE Journal, and the New Delta Review. Find her on Instagram at @poetpopstar.