Michael Schmeltzer

To Catch an Avatar

i. 
 
The scarlet cape slung over
small shoulders transforms
 
a granddaughter
to avatar, to myth. The wolf
 
stalked what he thought was
a goddess
 
of the forest, a potential lover. You lure
predators with blood; ask
 
any hunter. The color
red swishing back and forth,
 
something alive
but wounded. No predator
 
could resist. Did anyone expect
the wolf to crave anything
 
other than what it loved–the color
of blood driving his heart
 
wild? Did the wolf believe
that wearing the guise of blood-
 
relatives would lead to anything
other than the axe?
 
ii. Chat/room
 
When given infinite space and room,
 
how easily some slip out
of the banana peel of their skin
 
and tumble into the mush
of another fruit’s flesh.
 
Others, however, shed layer after layer
like an opalescent onion, desperate
 
to find someone
else entirely buried beneath.
 
But what they are
on the surface, they are
 
at the core–-a wolf
in wolf’s clothing, a smile
 
made entirely of fangs.
 
iii. Dateline NBC
 
Chris Hansen saunters on screen
with the confidence of a hunter
 
whose steel trap clamped shut
on the leg of a hungry animal
 
now completely harmless. 
And the beast, naked and starving
 
for the actress to return
to her role, has no more
 
layers to shed. His fangs
feign ignorance. His claws retract
 
the statements they clicked excitedly
on the keyboard the night before
 
as Chris Hansen calmly reads
excerpts from
 
an x-rated chatroom transcript
as if reciting a fairytale.
 
~
 
When we retell the story
of the predator, we should view
 
the adolescent girl
as the actress’ avatar, the star
 
of the worst episode
in the middle-aged man’s life.
 
And we should direct
that sad man’s story
 
towards the grandmother who amazed him
with the exotic
 
appearance of star fruit–
that moment he first believed
 
in disguises.
The cops conjure
 
an appropriately unhappy ending
while the man remembers
 
his father who brought him to the beach
to gaze at hundreds of star-
 
fish choking the rocks, how one
could chop them into tiny pieces
 
and all of them–every last speck
of stardust–would simply regenerate
 
back into themselves.

---

Where Light Resolves the Shadow

The brain wrinkled as bark,
every sulcus viscous with moss.
 
Such thickness in the senses
I can barely taste or touch
 
this forest. There is
nothing I can name here
 
but tree or tree, bird bird bird.
O dumb sadness,
 
dumb, dumb sadness.
It wasn’t so long ago
 
happiness like a little girl led me
to a three-layered sky:
 
sparrow, cirrostratus, sun.
Now I can’t imagine
 
the place where light
resolves the shadow
 
as if darkness were the issue.
Stars shine with the
 
dull throb of dim bulbs,
reach out like a father’s hand
 
that doesn’t strike the cheek
nor does it ever stop
 
that darker hand
from striking.  



--
Michael Schmeltzer is the author of Elegy/Elk River, winner of the Floating Bridge Press
Chapbook Award, and a forthcoming full-length from Two Sylvias Press. He has been published
in various journals such as Rattle, PANK, New South Journal, and Mid­American Review, with
work forthcoming inMeridian, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. He tweets ridiculous
things @mschmeltzer01