You brim with my long-ago eyes
and your lips on my name
give it back to me.
My ghost beats with blood
and thrums in my wrists, my throat,
when you light me with the tapers
of your fingers. My bones stretch
like cats. I could leap now
to the far windowsill of a girl
whose hair whipped the sun;
I could preen in the morning with a new tongue
while alley toms gathered in the lanes.
This bright balloon tugs at your hand
and you wonder if you should let it go
to bobble over the rooftops of what we see,
to watch it disappear into the sky’s white sponge—
and the answer we both know is,
you should. But its buoyancy teases your fist.
All night our uncommitted sins
tug like helium toward the clouds.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 2.
Melanie McCabe’s fourth collection of poems, All The Signs Were There, won the Longleaf Press Poetry Prize and will be out in 2026. Her debut novel, Road Longer Than Memory, will be published by Oceanview Publishing, in June of 2026. Her memoir, His Other Life: Searching For My Father, His First Wife, and Tennessee Williams, won the 2016 University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize.
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