Over by Mark Melnicove

“You admire this tower of granite, weathering the hurts of so many ages.” ~Emerson

A girl named Gaye, who never became a woman, lived
two blocks over and rode the same school bus as I.

She always sat by herself, but on a sunny Valentine’s Day in 1965,
she didn’t catch a ride. Later, when it was too late, my mother
told me, Doctors pumped out her stomach to try to prevent her
from succumbing to what she’d done, adding,

She’d hated herself…parents lived apart…slow reader
and runner…frizzy hair…freckles…nothing to look at…
as if our shaming had nothing to do with it.

Don’t go feeling that way about yourself, she warned.
But you won’t, you’re a boy.
Boys are solid, like stone—they don’t have those problems.

Which I believed until Thanksgiving
weekend, when a boy next neighborhood over, while hunting
alone, did what Gaye had done, except he used a gun.

Artist’s Statement

I was not thinking of Robinson’s “Richard Cory,” when I wrote this poem, but now that it’s finished, I see the resemblance. Of course, Robinson wasn’t the first to employ a surprise ending in a poem, and I wasn’t aiming for that effect when I began writing—to the contrary! But, as I remembered and remembered and remembered much of what I realized I had forgotten, I suddenly caught a whiff of an image of that boy who met his end by his own hand. And so, I was surprised by my surprise ending.

“Over” is one of a series of poems I’ve written where I reconsider childhood events. I’m fascinated (and sometimes horrified) by what I thought about them then, versus now. Each poem is a vehicle for me to discover the differences, juxtaposing them to lead to a new synthesis of understanding. Perhaps!

Mark Melnicove’s books include Sometimes Times (ekphrastic poetry, prints by Terry Winters, 2023), Africa Is Not a Country (children’s book, winner of the Children’s Africana Book Award, 2001), The Uncensored Guide to Maine (political satire, “banned” by L. L. Bean, 1984), and Advanced Memories (visual/found/erasure poetry, 1983). In 1978, he met Bern Porter (1911-2004), a “da Vinci of the atomic age,” and was soon publishing Porter’s books under his imprint, The Dog Ear Press; since Porter’s passing, Melnicove has been his literary executor and has just co-edited a “self-help” compilation, simultaneously sincere and satirical, of Porter’s best found poems, Now It Can Be—Why Did It Fail Before? (The Idea of The Book, 2023). Melnicove’s manuscript-in-progress is a book-length essay about 40+ years teaching creative writing in schools as a full-time high school ELA teacher and part-time writer-in-residence. A chapter was published earlier this year in Teachers and Writers magazine. The Kennebec River Valley, in Dresden, Maine, is his home.