Melissa Helton
Melissa Helton is from the Great Lakes region of Ohio and raises a family, teaches, and writes in Southeast Kentucky. Her work appears in the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Cutleaf, Still: The Journal, Appalachian Review, Norwegian Writers Climate Campaign, and more. Her chapbooks include Inertia: A Study (Finishing Line Press, 2016), which explores her father’s death, and Hewn (Workhorse, 2021), which deals with issues of queerness and polyamory in Appalachia.
Reading List
To My Girlfriend’s Garden
A broken tree, propped by 2x4s, won’t die and lies across your collapsed fence. Your brazen sunflowers, pubescent and not yet flowered, nod. Corn, too dense and tasseling, hisses in the breeze. We are obligated to each other, you, belching out buckets of jalapeños and German thyme each day that I don’t know what […]
Aspect Ratio of a Body
My body is an argument I did not start. —Morgan Parker, “AND COLD SUNSET” My body is a business deal I did not broker. It is a buffet I cannot eat. My body is Doppler radar tracking a storm that will not make landfall where I live. It is a novel I will not […]