Medicine

By Melissa Tuckey / Issue 11

After they’ve stolen the eggs from the chicken yard,
when the lottery ticket you thought you won
turned out to be a parking ticket, on a day
you could have slept through but didn’t,
somewhere at the bottom of a stack of bills,

like a smiley face left inside a lunch box,
a card with your name on it and inside the card,
all the love you could imagine,
more love than once split you open at the sides
from too much laughter

more than all the gold of sunlight just before dusk when
desire lays down its knitting,
love that blurs the space between us, love
so big you cannot see where it begins, or ends—
and sometimes, frankly, you forget its there,

atmospheric love, songs to which you know every word
and sometimes forget you are singing.

MELISSA TUCKEY is a poet and literary activist. She has a background in environmental activism and is a co-founder of Split This Rock, a national organization dedicated to “calling poets to the center of public life.” Tuckey is author of Tenuous Chapel, a book of poems selected by Charles Simic for the ABZ Press First Book Prize (2013) and editor of Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology (University of Georgia Press 2018). Her honors include a fellowship at Black Earth Institute, a winter fellowship at Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and writing awards from DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and Ohio Arts Council. She holds an MFA from George Mason University, and teaches community-based creative writing workshops in Ithaca, New York.