Poetry: Lynn Melnick

until we go home. If at home there’s a man named Lucky
then at home there’s a man named Lucky.
That’s his rattletrap, that’s his knife a baton in his fingers.

I can feel blood running down my arms.
It’s ninety-seven degrees.
The putrid seeded center pours like bile onto newspaper.

Breezes float through the only known window.
This house wasn’t meant to be a house.
There are three rooms and none of them a kitchen.

We don’t know where to keep the knives.
A long, long time ago I was gleaming with what I wanted
to be. And I’ll tell you what.

One afternoon, I fucked a man in three different rooms
because I didn’t know how to leave.
Sometimes I took rides home from strangers,

sometimes I was those strangers.
I was a hot spell in a dry heat.
Nothing should take as long as time is taking me.

That readers have loved this one especially surprises (and delights!) me because I was a bit embarrassed by it for a while.

I think it’s kind of barefaced and couched less behind its language than other poems in the book. It’s just like, “Hey Reader: Los Angeles is hot, people are violent, and saying no is a difficult skill that not everyone learns easily.”

I mean, I hope the language is doing what I ask it to do. I hope the poem feels like that searing heat, like the tediousness of carving a pumpkin, like taking rides home from strangers.

Several people have written to me specifically about this poem. Especially about the lines “A long, long time ago I was gleaming with what I wanted / to be.” Because it’s true for so many of us, I imagine. As dark as things will inevitably get, there is, at a certain age, whatever that age is for you, a belief in the future, a future.

That’s one of the obsessions of my book: how do you hold on to hope in the face of violence and trauma and California?

Luck! (Luck helps, anyway.)

A born-again nutcase in the Midwest began to email me relentlessly, often specifically about this poem.

He wants to save me.

That’s one of the obsessions of my book: how do you hold on to hope in the face of violence and trauma and California?

But it’s not the fucking in three rooms or the blood or the pagan holiday that appears to have troubled him so much. It’s the idea of luck. And I see how that could trouble an already troubled believer in God, but, yes, the thing I believe in is luck. Without luck I’d be dead. We all would. (Luck always runs out.)

Poetry isn’t memoir. But Lucky was a real person.

When I start writing any poem, it’s always with a specific memory in mind. Here I was thinking of LA in October (it often gets hottest in LA in autumn) and I remembered wearing a very short spandex skirt and very high heels while trying to walk through a “pumpkin patch” (by which I mean, vacant lot with a few gourds here and there) with this dude because he wanted to carve pumpkins for Halloween.

I was about 16. He was at least 10 years older and thought he was an artist. He was going to show off what he could do with a knife, although I already knew what he could do with a knife.

And then, like real life, the rest of the poem just happened from there.

—Lynn Melnick, Brooklyn, 2014

Lynn Melnick is the author of If I Should Say I Have Hope (2012) and her work has been published in BOMB, Guernica, Gulf Coast, jubilat, New Republic, Paris Review, Phantom Limb, Poetry Daily, A Public Space, and elsewhere. She is co-editor of an anthology of contemporary poetry for young adults, titled Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation (The Viking Press, 2015).

four score and seven years ago

Editor’s Recs:

Carl Phillips on No Kingdom.

Katie Ford on Spring Wish, Coliseum Theater and Divining Stick.

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Cover image credit: Zoe Crosher, photography; Alban Fischer, book design.

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