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    Gold That Frames the Mirror
    Gold That Frames the Mirror
    Gold That Frames the Mirror
    Ebook109 pages51 minutes

    Gold That Frames the Mirror

    By Brandon Melendez

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    About this ebook

    In Brandon Melendez’s debut poetry collection, Gold That Frames the Mirror, nothing sung can truly be lost.


    Orbiting a daisy-chain of fascinations that range from heritage & family to grief, music, & mental illness, these poems want to know what “home” means, even when the answers can seem too blood-bright to bear staring at. Yet do not mistake Melendez for a poet of an uncomplicated sadness: even when he writes of deep loss, there is the possibility of wonder & joy. Drawing from a wellspring of profound bewilderment present in his images as well as how language assumes—or is assumed by—form, Melendez knows poetry, like home, is something we carry with us in our bodies. Every certainty and every wonderment in Gold That Frames the Mirror is come by honestly and with Melendez’s unwavering & tender scrutiny. Here is a book haunted by history but never in service of it. Here is a book that wants to know what comes after elegy, when the gods slink back into their heavens, when we are only left with the names of our dead & the good, dark earth. Melendez offers something like a prayer against overlooking the past & to remember where the gold came from. After all, “Anywhere can become you / once you forget / how you got there."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWrite Bloody Publishing
    Release dateApr 22, 2020
    ISBN9781949342048
    Gold That Frames the Mirror
    Author

    Brandon Melendez

    Brandon Melendez is a Mexican-American poet from California. He is the author of Gold That Frames the Mirror (Write Bloody Publishing, 2019). He is a National Poetry Slam finalist, Rustbelt Poetry Slam finalist, and two-time Berkeley Grand Slam Champion. A recipient of the 2018 Djanikian Scholarship from The Adroit Journal, and the 2018 Academy of American Poets Award, his poems are in or forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Muzzle Magazine, Ninth Letter, The Journal, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. He received his BA from UC Berkeley, and his MFA from Emerson College.

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      Book preview

      Gold That Frames the Mirror - Brandon Melendez

      SYNONYMS FOR BORDER

      fringe |::| fraying boundary |::| line separating two political or geographical areas, especially countries |::| countries that flood in & out of each other’s gaping bodies |::| body of water that does not end with the horizon |::| edge of the map & the ghost ships anchored there |::| gold that frames the mirror |::| petroleum coating the tongue with coins |::| limit of geography unmarked by bloody hands |::| asymptote of eyes refusing to close |::| end of an executive order & the dead that come after |::| flank |::| surrounded by steel |::| curve of a corral & the horse’s broken jaw |::| distance two people cross to say I love you |::| the emptying of language & the bodies that unspool in its wake

      IN A CITY OLD AS SMALLPOX IN A PEROXIDE WHITE ROOM, MY THERAPIST ASKS A QUESTION ABOUT COPING

      Somewhere in Oakland,

      a warehouse catches fire

      & the people I love trapped

      inside inhale enough monoxide

      to smother the whole sleeping city. Elsewhere,

      a friend overdoses & I add his name

      to the list of ancestors made holy

      by a needle shoveled through skin.

      Before Christendom, holy meant preserved

      whole & indivisible. A stone pillar

      that cannot be unstoned. Across the Atlantic,

      someone I spent a summer with

      playing chess on a south Berkeley rooftop

      is carried off a plane past rows of weeping

      mothers, his heart stopped midair.

      What does it mean to leave this world

      from one country but never arrive

      elsewhere, to become an entry

      in someone’s catalogue of empty seats.

      An hour ago, an hour outside of Boston

      a boy was sitting in his driveway

      when a nearby chimney collapsed

      like a ransacked church, burying him.

      I can’t stop wondering who

      he was waiting for. Was it his mother?

      An old friend? How many of us wasted today

      waiting for a familiar face

      & instead, instead . . .

      DESMADRE

      Grandmother describes my Spanish as desmadre. She means my accent

      is the wreckage after the storm. Proof our family washed up

      in this country one day & were no longer from anywhere else.

      Desmadre, directly translated, means without mother.

      Grandmother’s history is a map I lost & have been searching for

      ever since. I have a theory: the voyage will end

      with my mouth open the last relic of la patria

      settling on my tongue for a moment before dissolving

      into the water. Or, another theory: I am not the wreckage

      but the storm—the unexpected wave that drowns the woman

      bringing her family home. The sandy brine that breaks through

      the hull & ruins all her books.

      ARCHITECTURE OF REFUGE

      My first memory is an open gate.

      On the other side my father sits

      in our living room, molding a castle

      from clay. Each steeple & drum tower:

      a brother, a son reaching out in praise

      or prayer. My father laughs as my small

      & feckless hands carve through his kingdom

      like a scythe. He laughs knowing he can build

      something new from the rubble. Stronghold.

      Hideout. Call it resurrection. Call it making room

      for joy; a boy learning the architecture of refuge

      from his father. A boy unaware of all the ways

      the earth demands breath as payment for breath.

      Ask

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