Editor’s note: With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, we are reminded about the preciousness of love – and how love means something different to each one of us. We asked members of the WhipCity Wordsmiths to share their thoughts on love – and as always – their submissions are thought-provoking, eloquent, and in many cases, personal. Our series today features Melissa Volker of East Longmeadow.
WESTFIELD-Melissa Volker describes herself as a self-proclaimed “geekgrrl” and “proud HufflePuff,” as well as a Marvel fanatic who loves sci-fi, video games, and cosplay, and builds dragon puppets as her alter ego, MyrInSong.
Melissa Volker is a literary and YA fiction author, and a member of the WhipCity Wordsmiths. (SUBMITTED PHOTO)
“Mostly, though, I love words that transcend and reach that part of you we all know is there but cannot describe – that part of us so deeply, painfully human,” she said.
Volker is an award-winning author whose debut novel, “Delilah of Sunhats Swans,” received a five star review from Reader’s Favorites and was praised by Alice Fulton, Guggenheim Fellow Poet, who said, “Delilah … is a charmer, a being blessed with a charisma as mysterious as it is luminous. You won’t soon forget her.”
Volker has both self-published and published through the local small press, Otherwords Press. She has written literary fiction, and unconventional, genre-bending YA that seeks to explore the lives of teens and young adults through the use of imaginative storytelling that plays with reality through magic and surrealism.
Her poem “If” follows.
If
If I go to hell,
Will you visit me?
Bake me a cake
With a snow cone inside,
That I share it with the devil
And give him a true taste of heaven.
If I burst into flame
While you’re holding my hand,
Will you gaze into my eyes
And tell me I am beautiful?
If I dance on your grave
Will you save me the waltz?
If I go to heaven
Will you rescue me?
Tear off my angel wings
And toss them to the wind,
That I might remember
How it was to be damned?
