Melissa E. Jordan

Over the bassinet and out the window 
came bristly small things, then orangutans and giraffes, 
stomping primevally up the gravel driveway 
before scattering, 
fading into the cottonwoods.

I tried to joke about it most mornings.
“My brain’s gone all wrong,” I’d drawl, 
my palms pivoting on the windowsill.

But the last word dragged out, not comically, 
but a lunatic gong, 
wrooooooong
And I couldn’t stop peering through the screening brush.

One morning I heard an elephant’s strangled trumpet,
and the treetops begin to shimmer —
I heard the faint screams of humans.
I was awake, I was surely awake, 
but the sound came again, a monster’s cry.

Then a hot air balloon breached the closest mesa,
braying air and filling the sky,
glorious and grotesque:

How it was so suddenly there,
an assault of color and shriek.
Like that birthing room shock, the surreal trick —
a woman splits in two, then holds herself in her arms.

 

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MELISSA E. JORDAN lives in Connecticut. Her recent poetry collection, Red Low Fog/Transcript (Animal Heart Press, 2022) is a hybrid of poetry and fiction. Her previous collection, Bain-Marie (Big Wonderful Press) was published in 2015. Jordan’s poems have appeared in The Cossack Review, The Dillydoun Review, Open: Journal of Art & Letters, Word Riot, Otis Nebula, Terrain, Off the Coast, Rat’s Ass Review, and elsewhere.