Melanie Maier Poetry - Book Excerpts

On a cloudless day its many hills
are straight verticals.
You can’t see the neighborhood
where she learned to skate,
the houses where she grew up,
or her mother, her father.

She sits on the weathered bench
where a maple gives shade.
On the moss-covered bricks:
weeds growing up,
between them leaves,
greened twigs and indestructible ivy.

Little golden plums fall hard -
hit the ground, her back, the table
where she is writing bent over paper.