Volume 16:1, Winter 2015
The Sonnet Issue
A Blizzard Blues
Some mornings there is no music.
The oaks’ arms, lids of traffic lights
wetting irises, spring, sick, blood.
The music sleeps with our mothers
rousing late from dreams where
they are still young, free; their children
never die before them, never break
stem before plum purples to taste.
While mothers are sleeping, thick
inglorious notes teeter along sidewalks,
cars sweeping past—this morning,
there is no sound, the absence
of touches that make love settles
easy in asphalt, quiet as water.
Melanie Henderson, Washington DC native poet, editor, photographer and publisher, is the author of Elegies for New York Avenue, winner of the 2011 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. An alumnus of Howard and Trinity Universities, she studied poetry in Dr. Tony Medina's "Boot Camp" and at the Voices Summer Writing Workshops (VONA) in San Francisco, CA prior to earning an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. Her poems have appeared in Drumvoices Revue, jubilat, Torch, Tuesday; An Art Project, Valley Voices, and The Washington Informer. She is a recipient of the 2009 Larry Neal Writers Award and a 2013 Pushcart Prize nomination from Iris G. Press. She is a Founding Editor of the Tidal Basin Review. http://www.dcelegies.com To read more by this author: Melanie Henderson: Wartime Issue