DEAR TERROR, DEAR SPLENDOR

                      by Melissa Crowe 

Yes, I realize wishing all the horrors
that will ever befall me or that I’ll ever
witness or hear about or even imagine

were over already
might be the same
as wishing to be dead.

But what can I say?
Dear Terror, Dear Splendor, Annabelle
got her learner’s permit today.

            Remember when that chicken, pecking for feed, bit her finger
            and I spent months fearing tetanus? Remember when a bat
            bloomed into the house through a hole in the window screen

            and my brain throbbed rabies for a year or when she cut
            her foot, hit her head, coughed
            black blood, was born

            with a fever
            a softspot
            a self?

Dear Terror, driving home on date night
we came upon a group of teenagers
who, bound for the prom, had struck a deer

and stood in the street bewildered
by its body so other drivers swerved
around their sobbing, sequined

congress, which caused one car
to summersault and I saw an arm cut
loose from its window and still do.

            But often I am made love to so sweetly,
            Dear Splendor, so expertly that the world
            ceases to exist or simply

            doesn’t matter, birth and death
            and blood and breath
            compressed, this body, this bed.

            Dear Splendor, Dear Terror, we doubled
            our danger this way or grew it by a factor
            I don’t know how, don’t want, to name.

Nights I still step into the slatted moon glow
of our child’s bedroom—our child, seventeen,
stretched aslant, asleep, across her double bed,

banking hours against the forever
she’ll soon start spending
                                         not here—      

and if I can’t see in that near-dark her torso
rise and fall, I lean in and listen for her breath.
I’ve heard it every time so far.

​

photo by Janet Cyr

​Melissa Crowe is the author of two chapbooks, Cirque du Crève-Cœur (dancing girl press, 2007) and Girl, Giant (Finishing Line, 2013), and her work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Seneca Review, among other journals. She’s co-editor of Beloit Poetry Journal and coordinator of the MFA program at UNCW, where teaches courses in poetry and publishing. She lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.