Melanie McCabe

Creation

We gave you a halo and fashioned you
a voice that could peel back the sea,
a voice that could root out even
the smallest trembler in the garden.
Out of the brown clay we were born with,
our hands rolled eyes for
the back of your head.

Some of us painted you red and roiling –
a pissed-off, smoking-gunned vigilante, while
others favored pastels—the waxy pink
camellia of mercy, the blue cradle
of a birdful egg—and anxious not
to disappoint, you rallied to master
both, but proved

not very apt at either.
We left a baby on your doorstep who
might have been the milkman’s son,
for all that he resembled you.
Others handed you long fuses tasseled
with explosions and flicked your wrist
to strike the match.

Out of abandoned wells, from foxholes
and bombed ruins, from gurneys
and oxygen tents, we called
your name like an abracadabra.
We hocus-pocused you out of
the darkness that waited behind
the unmasking of the deep.

We scripted your answers and ghost-wrote
the litany of your lungs. Envious
of the gowns of lilies, the swoop of sparrows,
we feathered you these white wings
that fan a far-off perfume across my face.
I breathe my faith now in precisely this:
not that we created you, but that we needed to.

Spring

It’s back—insinuating through each square of screen,
carried in on shoulders and shaken airborne.
Seasonal anthrax.

The night air is sticky with it. It stirs in the bog of my throat,
tickles relentlessly the rims of my eyes
with lilliputian feathers.

Each infinitesimal particle unsheathes a machete
from its trench coat of yellow dust
to skewer my sinuses.

The laden breeze I cannot bear to bar lures me without
a scruple—a pusher with potent narcotics
of wet bloom and stamens thrusting.

Teased out, I sprawl into fresh-mown grass, addict for just one
hit of April, willing to trade weeks of clog and sniffle
for this night scent of blossom and earth.

Gretel Tells All

I never forgave our father. Like water
he changed to fill the shape she made for him.
Hunger had holed up in all of us, but to him
she also brought bird-startle fear; to his heart,
the heft of stones. Through walls we listened to her

goad and wheedle him. I thought he would balk,
defy her—didn’t we stand with his bones?
didn’t we look to him with our mother’s eyes?

They lured us deep into the woods, left
a fire that would burn down, a tatter
of bread. By moonlight we followed the gleam
from white pebbles Hansel had dropped,
yet where could they take us but home?
We turned up like demons in a bad dream
from which she was hell-bent on waking.

All we had for that last journey were tufts
of bread, and the crows took those. We wandered
days until that cottage reared up, its sugar glistening,
its bricks crumbling cake. An oasis with teeth.
All of this for you, said the woman at the door,
guiding us with manicured nails that would
later hook to claws, smiling with lip-lined mouth

that would cave to the red stitch of a shriveled apple.

I could never have saved us without the gift
of her blindness, her greed. I ran to free Hansel
so we could hear her howl, could breathe
the foul smoke that contorted like a goblin
from the tomb she’d meant for me.
Our arms heaped high with her gold and Tiffany’s
plunder, her adders of pearls, we trailed
a white bird’s song that led us home.

Home—strange word that somehow felt
like Sanskrit on my tongue. Father covered us
in tears, told us in a crush of contrition that his wife
was dead. But of course, I already knew. Though
he never said exactly how, even all these years gone by,
I still see that writhing helix of smoke, still hear
the screams that swirled into the changing air
from a fire that spat my name.

Melanie McCabe is the author of four books of poems, most recently All The Signs Were There, which won the Longleaf Press Poetry Prize. Her debut novel Road Longer Than Memory will be out from Oceanview Publishing in June of 2026. Her memoir, His Other Life: Searching For My Father, His First Wife, and Tennessee Williams, won the 2016 University of New Orleans Press Prize.