~ after Dustin Brookshire and Caridad Moro-Gronlier
Courtney thinks of mornings spent with Melissa, coffee cups congregating between them, the sun slipping into the sky. Courtney tells Melissa of the week her father died, how it was the first time she’d spoken to her mother in years, how she refused to call the state her parents live in home, even if she spent her first twenty years there, how her mother wore her grief like a corsage pinned to her chest. It felt performative, but it was the first time we’d spent time together in years without fighting so I guess that’s something. Courtney shrugs, spins out of her chair, and reaches for the carafe of coffee.
Melissa reaches for the carafe of water—too much wine. When Melissa’s father died, cut from the photo of her childhood living room, she settled on the floor where his feet used to be. Her mother in the loveseat. When they fought, Melissa’s bird heart longed to escape her chest, but she stayed another five years in that house. She couldn’t picture a future her mother wasn’t in. She didn’t know possible, didn’t know permission. And now—look around, this bounty. Evenings spent with Courtney, selfie smiles in a booth, glasses toasting the camera.
Courtney holds her phone out, wants to capture this moment with Melissa: the smiles breaking across faces, the happiness thick in the air. She sends photos like these to her friends, her sister. Never her mother. Sometimes her mother tries: sent her flowers for her book launch. But didn’t buy the book, didn’t read the poems. Her mother still performing while Courtney keeps living.
Melissa wants real life, not her mother’s performances. Her mother did buy the book, bought twenty, mailed them to aunts and cousins and Melissa’s fourth-grade teacher. But in private, in texts, she isn’t proud at all, childhood echoes of when Melissa forgot to be small. If her mother claims not to remember. If her mother can’t admit the poems are true. Melissa will create her own family album.
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Melissa Fite Johnson is the author of three full-length collections, most recently Midlife Abecedarian (Riot in Your Throat, 2024). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, HAD, Whale Road Review, SWWIM, and elsewhere. Melissa teaches high school English in Lawrence, KS, where she and her husband live with their dogs.
Courtney LeBlanc is the author of Her Dark Everything (forthcoming 2025), Her Whole Bright Life, winner of the Jack McCarthy Book Prize, Exquisite Bloody, Beating Heart, and Beautiful & Full of Monsters. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Riot in Your Throat, an independent poetry press.