Dogstar Poems

by

Melissa Anderson

ISBN: 978-1-964277-25-7, 88 pages, $15 (+ shipping)

Release Date: November 12, 2024

The Advance Sale Discount for this title has expired. For those who prefer to pay by check, the price is $19/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412.

PLEASE NOTE: Ordering in advance of the release date entitles the buyer to a discount. It does not mean the book will ship before the date posted above and the price only applies to copies ordered through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.

Melissa Anderson is a writer, artist, and craftsman. Now a furniture maker by trade, she has worked variously in theater, the fine arts, and leather production, all of which influence the way her work explores the beauty in the banal, and how the things we make help define who we are and the places we call home, a concept her poetry circles back to again and again. She was raised and currently resides in upstate New York, where she can often be heard at several local open mics.

Melissa Anderson dedicates this book to the memory of her grandmother, Catherine Anderson, who was a beloved member of the same poetry community that Melissa has herself entered reading her moving, personal, meditative poems at local poetry open mics. “There are so many stars…” and like them her new words continue the light of past generations of poets — “I am making progress, grandmother … I sat down and wrote a poem.” ~Dan Wilcox

Mellisa Anderson’s first book of poetry is an elegy for all she has lost and a treasure map to what she hopes to find. Using clever metaphor and a love for the small moments she invites her reader with her and shares all she has found. She reminds us that simple doesn’t mean easy and even winter, even death is finite. ~Jared Singer

Blackstrap Molasses

Grown up spitting watermelon seeds to
the ducks over the gunwale;
blackstrap molasses girl;
grandmother’s attic girl;
book-nosed and barefoot,
ankle-deep in the creek mud.

Grown up two-stepping over garden slugs
on the way to the outhouse;
grown up hogging the dial-up;
cold-blooded girl, grown up
following sunbeams to a high warm rock girl;
head in the clouds and mucked up to
the elbows in color.

Grown up eight worlds at once, only
half of them real;
grown up drifting off to train whistles, girl
mother’s daughter and father’s son.
Schoolwork and no trouble girl;
wood pile and ash shovel girl;
wood pile and ash shovel girl.

Grown up multiplicity
slunk by under the chicken wire,
snuck back from the woods in
upturned jean cuffs, grown
from courage made in crowds and
from ghosts met in solitude.

Big sky and night terror girl;
old lace and new flannel girl;
scratching at the walls forever girl,
always a sucker for a story
or a song.

Hound

I am looking for you.

This year I promised to follow my nose-
a hound with its hopeful
face in the dirt
scenting, the sense of the heart,
a deep body-memory.

I am looking for you,
dragging my sore feet to dance class,
to dive bars,
to dinner with friends of friends
who talk about sex as though
it is of more than the body, as though
they have known what it is
to bite clear through flesh into
something else beneath.

I go home and turn three times in my sheets.
When I dream, my nose
is full of your blood-
salt, vetiver and citrus-

I am looking for you.
I am looking for you.
When I wake the air is only clean.

Love Letter From Quarantine

When you are not here,
you are less-
real.
I can’t ever explain it without feeling
like an infant or some kind of
particularly winsome dog, but

it isn’t forgetting so much
as a matter of gravity.

You come, and the world
warps around the shape of you,
body heat and solidity where once
there was only ephemera.

I am so used to being alone.
You go, and the world shrinks back
to the shape of that solitude
with the elasticity of long practice, only
small gaps left in the shape
of texts, photos, plans for next weekend.

We each return, return
return, the color balance
recalibrating around
your voice’s tumbling burr. I re-learn
to see myself, re-learn to be
the person I was and also this
you-person
reborn when you are in sight of me-
that winsome dog again,
still learning to pass the mirror test, still
forgetting she likes swimming
every time, darling,

this is not to say when you go I do not love you.
Only that the dumb animal of me
can only hold all the scope of you in memory for so long.

This is to say, I love you again every time I see you.
This is to say, come back soon.