Melanie Browne- Three Poems

The Creepiest Museum

We visit the Funeral
museum, because
I am a little curious,
a little morbid, and because
it is October, where you
can get away with being
all of those things,
they have Snow White's glass
coffin, and memorials
from the astronauts
that died on the Challenger,
they have a mock crypt
belonging to Marilyn
Monroe and the style of hearse
JFK took his last ride in,
we see how coffins use
to be iced before the
days of embalming,
and what happens to a Pope's
ring once he no longer needs it,
in the gift shop we buy pencils
and coffee mugs,
and chattering skeleton heads,
and I feel a little older
as we drive away,
but also more human somehow



A Winter's Tale

I watch as the man's dog
starts to smell the rat,
at least three feet long
and splashed across
the pavement,
I wonder if rats ever
served any evolutionary
purpose in the history of
man, but I'm too bored
to Google, and I wonder
if last night’s hard rain
was what stopped him
in his tracks,
he reminds me of
Templeton from
Charlotte's Web,
or he would have,
if he weren't squished
flat by someone’s front
left tire, I walk inside
to let the hotel manager
know that there’s a dead
rat out in the parking
lot, she seems thankful,
and I think,
this is the beginning
this is how winter begins



Every Proper Southern Lady

needs a gold plated
bone saw,
sure, most of the time
it's all fun and
games and mint juleps,
seducing the
men-folk with a slight
flip of a silk fan,
but comes a time
in every southern lady's
day when she will
have to stop flirting
and start sawing,
(it's life and death
after all,)
she can recite the
highwayman's poem
to calm the soldiers
screams as she
wipes the
sweat from her
brow,
in a time of crisis,
she can hold it together,
she can get the
job done.