The Weavers of Ansari

by Melissa Dickson

Already there’s a breeze and something colder
in it. The boys wild as these woods, too young
to think of the long decay. On the air, voices
remote as the sun, our solar powered radio:
election fraud, poverty, threats, car bombs
at the weaver's polls. We’re miles from the road,
a half-mile from water and an enchantment
of river cane thick with insects. The rustle
of gear, a fireside night—thin steaks turned
once, asparagus, honeyed tea, one block each
of pocket-softened Hersheys, all shuttled
over granite, through scissoring switchbacks,
under emerald bursts of saplings. We listen
past dusk as the radio fails taking with it
the weavers and their silk rugs—
unimagined, colorless as thinning smoke—
taut on silent looms.

Mother, Easter 2014

by Melissa Dickson

She’s seventy today. Already
my child longer than I hers.

In her basement apartment
my husband tutors her on a new TV,

the intricacies of its remote,
the possibilities on screen.

Upstairs, the children begin to long
for next year’s Easter morn.

There’s lamb in the oven, mint
on the sill. She’ll want balloons,

ice cream, something wrapped
in paper and streaming ribbons.

She needs her pills and another
skein of yarn for the blanket

she’s been knitting twenty years,
and may knit for twenty more.

Sorting Socks by the light of a Flat Screen

by  Melissa Dickson

All the socks were black but patterned, subtle
intricate filigrees, braids, herringbones,

tone on tone variations, minute shifts
in feathered thread, pewter dots, silver stripes,

the occasional grid with a sole platinum
seam. That’s how I spent my day, suspending

my husband’s socks inches from my face, reading
each like a Gnostic text, mating them into pairs,

and heaving them through our bedroom’s
faltering light toward the open drawer.

Black Widow

by Melissa Dickson

That summer I counted eight, nine, ten.
Under upturned flower pots,
behind the gutter spout, in the drink cup
of an outgrown stroller. The children
had never seen anything so black.
Black as funeral boots, I said; black
as an ebonized chest; black
as my skillet, oil-rubbed, glistening;

black as Vulcan’s ass. We sprayed
them with bleach, poured gasoline
in their nests, thrust sticks in the breaches
of mortar—dying to call out
that enchanted globe of belly,
infinity mirror. Her hourglass,
aflame, hidden even in the pleats
of jade rising inside my den.