Balloon Off Course

Poems by Melissa Sawyer

ISBN: 978-1-59948-366-5
Cover price: $8 ($6 if ordered from the MSR Online Bookstore)

 

This Limited Edition chapbook is part of Main Street Rag's Author's Choice Chapbook Series.

Released: March 14, 2012.

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About the Author / Recommendation / Samples

Author Bio

 

Melissa Sawyer
Melissa (Missy) Sawyer, a graduate of Queens University with a Master’s degree in Creative Writing, was a published poet, artist, avid gardener, an assistant at CPCC’s literary festivals, and a loving mother and grandmother. She worked at Carolinas Medical Center and continued to work full time as she earned her college degrees. She died in March 2011 at age 50, following a brief struggle with cancer. She had a distinct love for unusual people, eclectic things and all kinds of animals, especially the homeless and homely. Often she could be found playing just one more game of Yahtzee, working an impossible puzzle, or challenging us with questions like: If you can’t sneeze with your eyes open, can you laugh without smiling? Her ability to write intense and vivid moments into tiny poem packages curiously mimicked the way she was; I’ll never know how such a person could be packaged so small.

—Sydney Sawyer Davis

Recommending Author's Comment

 

These poems by Melissa Sawyer, published posthumously, show her delight in life’s simple things—combs, wind chimes, tangled moss, bandanas. Lean, yet layered, the poems attain a sense of intuitive knowing, a tender reckoning made palpable by her untimely death. Her playfulness joins irony when it touches soul. Missy enjoyed quarreling with “the Greats”—taking them on, as when she mimics Kay Ryan (“Ryan’s Last Straw”); and inviting them in (“Taking Stern to work—9:00pm”): “It’s as if he knows…a bobcat will cross my path in two long strides,/…. It’s as if Stern knows/ I’d choose no other poet for this moment,/as if he knows I’ll tell no one of the big cat hanging here/…the splash of white on the tip of its bobbed tail/as clear as a star in a country sky. /I know now this is sacred, this is the struggle, this is the secret, this is sorrow.”

--Irene Blair Honeycutt

 

Samples

 

Found on the Doorstep

 

Please take in this poem
and treat it kindly.
I am no longer able to care for it.
It isn't much trouble,
mostly self-sufficient,
but sometimes
it cries out in the night.

Worker Bees Gather Pollen

 

There is a drone in my collage
photo-frozen on a purple flower
packing pollen on hairy legs
to carry home, like saddlebags.
It makes no sense. It's not his job
but with nips of sap and summer heat
he dances drunkenly for the queen.

His still and veiny wings
upset the poet stuck in words,
viscous, honeyed, out of reach,
anxious to cross-pollinate,
to glue more images on the page,
restless for the moon to break
and spill its ghosts on empty space.

 

Carolina

 

I think I'll leave for another state
maybe Florida where it never snows,
no damp cold to ache my bones,
just sand and sun and no-see-ums,
Disney World and Sanibel.
Maybe I'll seek some open space
in Utah, the Dakotas or Idaho,
grow orchards and cattle,
spread out and out,
marry a Mormon or two.

Here the pollen makes me sneeze
and humid summers move in sweat.
The winter's dull gray afternoons
are bleak and fall is nothing more.
Nothing really holds me here
looped inside the Bible belt,
no ties that bind, not even faith.

 

Balloon off Course

 

Your remains are entangled
in the limbs outside my door.
A red knotted stump of tail.
You bring no news of where you've been
or just how far you've come.
I cannot know what tempest wind
left this bit of rubber skin
shredded into pennants.
I cannot know who tied your string
or filled you for your flight
or if the eyes that watched you go
were full of sadness or delight.
But here you're captured,
snagged and coiled yet still feather light.
Your spirit hasn't blown away.
It marks a westward wind.

 

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