G U E S T #18 : Melissa Eleftherion : Introduction

 

 

 

Transformation is the great life integer. As discomfiting and tenuous as it sounds, we move through phases & changes as we become & become again. During this unique life cycle where we are being invited/forced to stretch & grow more than usual, I wondered how/if poets were getting through, & what it might look like to cohere these visions.

I reached out to various poets & writers to submit work on the theme of transformation, some of whom I did not know at all, and in doing so, developed & deepened a few relationships with poets I had long admired. This too became an opportunity for stretching outside my own comfort zones.   

Each of these works takes as its fulcrum the concept of transformation. In each of these poems, there is a turning; a decisive pivot of the will to consider or become something other than human; some process by which we might transmogrify into a greater understanding; by which we might at once be immersed and immerse our cells & light into a great organism. Might this be a homecoming, might this signal at last a belonging?

So, gentle reader – transform with us, eat “serviceberries fresh from the shrub”, visit “white skulls resting on the sage-covered desert”, “learn to communicate those languages. Breathe this all in. Hrim: seed mantra.”, “the songs of abolitionists & those bold enough to dream”, “to make wings out of no thing but air and steel”, “here is a wish and the wish is love”, “…to admit that I just wanted to go somewhere and be if not normal then in context”, “We will wear the agates Their inscriptions Cracked from Wildfire”, “may we fall into mouths that devour us.”

 

 

 

Melissa Eleftherion is a cis queer human, a writer, a librarian, and a visual artist. She is the author of field guide to autobiography (The Operating System, 2018), & ten chapbooks, including trauma suture (above/ground press, 2020), & abalone (poems-for-all, 2021). Her poems & prose have been widely published in various journals including the Berkeley Poetry Review, Entropy, & La Vague. Born & raised in Brooklyn, Melissa created, developed, and co-curates The SF State Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange with Elise Ficarra. She now lives in Northern California where she manages the Ukiah Library, curates the LOBA Reading Series, and serves as the Poet Laureate of Ukiah 2021-2023. Recent work is available at www.apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.