Poetry: Selections from Jason Melvin

Learned behavior

I took a semester of psychology at community college

so, I know about this stuff

Humans don’t have instincts

we don’t eat our placentas after childbirth

having no natural predators

we never fear of being prey

unless you’re a college girl at a frat party

but I watch my 10-month-old granddaughter

and her two new front teeth

little white knubs

just breaking the gum line

and how she chews her yogurt bites

right at the front of her mouth

Did she learn this from watching us

rip meat with our incisors?

If I were to keep her for the weekend

and drop-dead early Friday morning

by Sunday, starving and weak

would she crawl over to my lifeless body

and start to chew?

knowing that survival made this necessary

or would my little white malti-poo

barely eight pounds

need to show her how

to tear the flesh from my bones

with those two tiny nubs

Lessons in breaking shit and why

I wanted the sound of glass shattering

I got a thump and crackle, everything’s plastic

This is what you do with rage, boys

 

carried the 47” flat screen

out to the front yard

to dole out some punishment

 

the nerve of it

to stop working on Super Bowl Sunday

hometown Pittsburgh Steelers in the big game

 

baseball bat for the eleven-year-old

golf clubs for me and the sixteen-year-old

I demanded the first shot

 

we take our turns

a swing, a smash and a smile

pieces begin to gather in the grass

 

I think of poisonous gases

but the laughter, the one-up-manship

I dismiss the risk

 

weapons resting on shoulders

satisfied it’s learned its lesson

Eleven gives it one more boot stomp

 

leave it displayed, let the neighborhood know

if you’re inanimate and electronic

don’t fuck with the Melvin boys

 

Sixteen grabs the 24” from his bedroom

we eat chips and laugh at absurd commercials

and the Big Game, well, we lost

Gary, I think I’ll go now

Words said

as he decides to pull over

stop the slow trip to the hospital

and call an ambulance

 

Was it giving in?

Fuck you if it was

but I know better

we were raised as fighters

 

Was it the inevitable?

finally come to light

dying young our legacy

accepting the expectation

 

Why didn’t you listen?

as he told you no

as he pleaded

Don’t you die on me!

Jason Melvin received a gimmicky T-shirt from his teenage daughter on Christmas with a picture of one large fist fist-bumping a much smaller fist. The caption read, “Behind every smart-ass daughter is a truly asshole Dad”.  It fit. His work has recently appeared in A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Terror House, Roi Faineant and others. He was nominated for Pushcarts by Outcast and Bullshit Lit. He was named second runner up for the Heartwood Poetry Prize 2021.