Poetry Month 2012: Dr. Melissa F. Alvarado - Grief Tours

Dr. Melissa F. Alvarado is a narrative poet from Nebraska, now living in Los Angeles, who recently performed with the legendary Wanda Coleman and Laurel Ann Bogen. She is a Nebraska Center for Writers author with work published in journals including The Midwest Quarterly, Chum, The Toronto Quarterly, Plains Song Review, as well as Looking Past (Goldfish Press), and Times of Sorrow, Times of Grace (Blackwaters Press). Her first break occurred when she received the honor for best work from the Poet Laureate of Nebraska, William Kloefkorn. She holds baccalaureate degrees from the University of Nebraska in both English and Biology, and a Ph.D. in Pharmacy from Creighton University, a private, Jesuit college in Nebraska. Melissa’s forthcoming chapbook It Wasn’t Like In the Movies is a work dedicated to her late niece, Dakota Cierra Christina Moler, who lost her life at the young age of 14 to drowning while heroically trying to save the life of another child.


Grief Tours

             (For Susan H.)

Grief tours
are when
it’s more wrong
to get out of bed
at all,
but more right
to decline
bouquets of flowers

We might bundle them
with a string
hang them
upside down,
and watch them
dry away,
dry all away
until
we have so much