Today’s choice

Previous poems

Rhonda Melanson

by | Dec 4, 2025 | , ,

 

 

 

Holy Ground

I imagine my mother pulling apart my praying hands. Don’t be such a holy roller, she’d taunt. Get over here, quit committing to the ethereal, get down on those knees and help your family pick strawberries. The bending made me sulky. The magic of growing things, its tangible beauty, I did not understand. Items to be plucked, washed, diced, plopped into pies and loaves, scooped into freezer bags. No one ever pointed out to me the rootedness of a carrot, pointy and orange, how within the soil, it etched out its own positive space. No one ever demonstrated to me how peas slept soundly in their own alien habitat, spaceship pods, rudely awakened by earthly poachers like me. I would have worshipped them. Extracted their baby knowledge, considered their plucked sacrifice as I consumed them, each little pearl lolling on my tongue. With this knowledge and other pursuits of gardenly delights, I might very well have wrenched back my hands, held within me a berry of fertile prayer:

red as strawberries
exploding seed and colour
spillage most holy

 

 

A graduate of Queen’s University Artist In The Community Education Program, Rhonda Melanson has been published in several print and online magazines and is a recent recipient of the The Ted Plantos Memorial Award in Ontario, Canada. She is the author of two chapbooks: Gracenotes (Beret Days Press) and My Name is Mary (Alien Buddha Press). She also co-edits a literary blog Uproar.

Melanie Tibbs

by | Aug 27, 2024 | ,

People came to find out what ‘Garage Sale’ meant
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Andy Breckenridge

by | Aug 23, 2024 | ,

      Abertawe After Richard Siken For CHD Tell me about the time I mansplained that Swansea is the English for Abertawe and means town at the mouth of the River Tawe. And about when, from the hill above Rhossili beach Lundy Island’s spectral mass...

Lesley Burt

by | Aug 20, 2024 | ,

Red-hot-pokers blazon her two world wars in flowerbeds, and in her hearth. The coalman drops odd nuggets under gaslight for neighbours to fetch in a bucket.