Poems - JP Melville

Amniotic Darkness 2019 and old Imishli   jp Was it war once here? Am I that war? Drops splatter in the dust, bring softness to the evening. Thick air becomes light, even as the sun drops below the horizon. I sit on a veranda. I have showered. Smoking a cigarette, watch mud form, watch a chicken huddle under a plank of wood. We hide from the rain. We watch leaves of quince trees shiver with pleasure. Landlady brings me a meal of cheese: sliced cucumber, sliced bell peppers, bread, stuffed tomatoes. stuffed eggplant. stewed lamb… potato and yoghurt and tea. I snuff my cigarette. I enter the house to eat. I sit where landlady has placed the meal for me. At the head long table. Attended by none but me. Eat like a king in an empty castle. Absurd, this coming to live in another country. Absurd, this believing that one is welcome. I am not sold in. To be polite, I devour all that is on my plate as though watched f...

  For Monday I Wait No More. november 2001 (Azerbaijan) jp melville There is war. Said. One does not have to accept war. Said. There is war. Said. Men die. Children go hungry. Dirt grows under the nails. Bottles get smashed. Crows roost or pick on the unspeakable. Rain falls and mud thickens. Cold cuts into fingers. Low voices dissolve into dark skies studded with stars. Wind whispers lonely through rattling dried leaves. Ragged dogs with ribs showing root in forgotten garbage. Widowed young women hunger after men’s bodies they cannot have. Rivers flow sleepily along empty banks. Rust gathers on steel posts. Listless smoke curls from cold stove pipes. A plant tips, dried, the stem snaps, the pod falls slowly, Slow through an arc of endless time, Sweeps from standing tall, The sun and clouds swirling above its drunken toppling, Speeding ever so more quickly, Down, Plummeting down,...