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Rimbaud Sans Verlaine

I am feeding a ghost;
carrying around his memory, our argot. 
                                                                                         

                                                                                            I have become the scar of our experiment,
                                                                                            left him livid, as in bruised;
                                                                                            no bright spot but a blackbird.
                                                    
                                                      I am made of the water
                                                      I louched with my spirits
                                                      in Café Rat Mort,
                                                      the drinks in magnum,
                                                      the err on the side of reckless.

He has made my body a farce.
And all these new bodies;
I hate them for their noise.
                                                                                         
                                                                                            Sometimes my waking pain
                                                                                            starts in my dreams;
                                                                                            he is at doors to this world scratching 
                                                                                            for doorknobs not there.

My head is lame and faulty;
I went for his wrists with blades.
Something in our history has not yet broken;
we are too raveled and lousy with dull knives.







On a Line Translated

“J’y laisserai la peau et les os”
translated as “It will be the death of me”
and I would become a quick murderess
should I meet this translator, this coddler 
with cliché, shape shifter of words to a body 
so familiar it is given the recognition of a stranger. 

Am I too quick? Is it a white translation, 
a mothering fib like when I heard the rasp 
of father’s shovel on the asphalt while mother
explained the dog missed his dog family?
Is there too much vinegar in the literal
so the benevolent meaning-giver swaddles
with the idiot’s idiom and I am the brat,
the ignorant little horror who whines?

I do not take issue with every misnomer,
the loose cannon who is not really heavy metal
on wheels careening  around a ship deck
or with those who say “beg your pardon” and never
get on their knees and plead, or the contradiction 
of “funeral home” which is truly a half-way house, 
where the ragged life is stitched back together. 
It is not there where the body dwells, nor where 
my life’s narrative meets an end plot. Translation: 
“I will leave there the skin and the bones."





Melissa Holm is a graduate of The University of Mississippi’s MFA program in poetry. Her poems have been published in The American Poetry Journal, Plainsongs, The DMQ Review, Pif Magazine and The Southern Poetry Anthology. Currently, she is the Editorial Assistant for The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett Project at Emory University in Atlanta, GA.