Manny Melendez
Manuel A. Melendez is a multi-genre writer born and partially raised in Camagüey, Cuba. He has been published in Carolina Muse Literary & Arts Magazine, WayWords Literary Journal, Apricity Magazine, Dream Noir Magazine, and Superstition Review. He has received several awards for his writing (across multiple genres), including The 3rd Annual Derick Burleson Poetry Contest Award, the E. L. Bartlett Contest for Literary Criticism Award, and The Farthest North Fiction Contest Short Story or Single Chapter Award. He will forever be proud of his freshman thesis: the first screenplay adaptation of Call Me by Your Name.
lack(tone)
I.
You obsess over this because you are tasked:
The boat is leaking, frothing tips of hashed-out spires, as they
decide: which kind of body is most acceptable as the hole-plug. would
that wood could ever splinter evenly, but some one—some say only one—must not
prevail at the base of the oxidizing queen. permit
the notion: that green is not rot but a holy shield, and then return
to the discovery of what it could be like to become that color and
live. bent
around the gaping maw of this boat: the twine akin of some one as a wound in
technicolor, because the committee is another late traversal through a
bogging lockjaw, the klaxon clatter of a distant
pent-up crest of alleluia: in the imperative hallway,
—the scraped moat— a scrap of junkyard paper carries names out to the crushing waves, crying
to be delivered to the shadeless lakes of their mothers, the milk that spills out
without sinking reparations.
II.
Always this wrong color takes the boot:
you. The dimmest light by the curdling moon, while
you brace for the prism that wills no refractions for your
mewling, hewing hue. the battened hatches to better
protections from the insistent wreck of our selves
, fumbling apologetic corpses of papers that watch
from indistinct pews: how each square can lie, then collapse, from
exhausting the red performance. the
browning mouth of bleachers
is painted over with your smarting flesh, the dictation of more erasures, of
how to jettison another dark pound of you from this festering fleet, a
kind of kindness, light in lightness. the digesting mirror.
yet our fervent stench is unabating and I
diminish the thought
of: swimming in a riverbed that can keep witness to what we
slough, the smothered hymnals that instruct us on how we might
stay afloat even in the yawning gulf of drown
when uttered in the wrong tone
I became the Body Electric
to learn no body wanted to
take the full charge of my self.
I took it personal:
It was my person,
my only skin
to long in.
Too long
in