Melanie McCabe

Night Trick

Profligate now only in the bad neighborhoods called
mind, called mine, where a fallen woman can still
squander with abandon. To uncinch, unstay, live
loose, let dark pearls roll and spill from
the tongue, let out the long low ahhh
of recognition. That pig grunt. Pig pen. Known
trough. Who wouldn’t wallow in such good mud?

Fatted calf burning, someone calling, but breasts
to the bar, coins blooming in gold buds from
red nails, an itch to scratch and scratch marks
to rake. Who goes home when the rabbit still rises
kicking and hot from the upturned hat? Who wakes
when dreams can be linked like scarves, threaded
coral and crimson through dawn’s gray eye?

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Melanie McCabe is the author of four books of poems, most recently the forthcoming All The Signs Were There, which won the Longleaf Press Poetry Prize. Her debut novel Road Longer Than Memory will be out from Oceanview Publishing in June of 2026. Her memoir, His Other Life: Searching For My Father, His First Wife, and Tennessee Williams, won the 2016 University of New Orleans Press Prize.