Melissa Eleftherion
Animal Style Fire Halo
Long Distance can be Pleasing
to the Combustible,
From throat’s flame a roaring tenement
A mess of ketchup for your dirty parts.
Bus shelter holograms,
Burning, Becoming.
Melissa Eleftherion was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Some recent work can be found in TRY, Ur Vox, Letterbox Magazine, 580 Split, and MiPOesias, as well as online in Womb, the press gang, There, Shampoo, and Cricket Online Review. She received her MFA from Mills College, and is now a candidate for a degree in library science at SJSU. Occasional rants and poems can be found at melissatherion.blogspot.com. She shares a home in Berkeley, California, with her husband, her three-year old son, and a couple of chickens.
“Some summers we escaped upstate to avoid Brooklyn’s burning sidewalks. One night after swimming in Lake Lucerne with my father, I had to flee a bat who sought comfort in my long bedraggled curls. The whole family sat inside the screened-in porch cheering me as I ran toward them shrieking. That screen, that porch became a memory of comfort and safety.”