Melissa Studdard

For Baudelaire

In the woods you found a carcass with maggots in its chest,
with waterfalls in its eyes, with the buzz of life still

hovering around its skull, and in commemoration, you grabbed
your sweetheart’s hand, with your left, and on your right, you

snatched the clasped hand of the world and said: look here, how
we build skyscrapers in the cavity of death’s groin, how we

paint lilacs on its ribs. We will drive motor cars over its
bones and laugh in the waning perfume of midnight, and, my love,

I will write you a poem, a tribute to your beautiful decay,
to your rotting thighs, to the death you will birth with your sex

because, truly, this is beauty—this festering carcass in the woods,
this putrid nag, truth. And in it, you will live forever.

Melissa Studdard is a professor, a book reviewer at-large for The National Poetry Review, a contributing editor for Tiferet Journal, host of the radio interview program Tiferet Talk, and a teaching artist for The Rooster Moans Poetry Cooperative. Her books include the bestselling novel Six Weeks to Yehidah (winner of the Forward National Literature Award, finalist for the National Indie Excellence Award), the companion journal My Yehidah, and the forthcoming collection of interviews, The Tiferet Talk Interviews.