Melanie Tafejian is a poet from the Pacific Northwest. She teaches writing at North Carolina State University. In 2020 she won the North Carolina Poetry Contest, and she was awarded first place in the 2021 Atlanta Review International Poetry Prize. Her work has been featured in The Los Angeles Review, Poetry Northwest, and other journals.

Hear Melanie reading and discussing her poems on this episode of Earth Eats

PRESERVED LEMONS 
By Melanie Tafejian, originally published in Willow Springs Magazine

Preserved they don’t burn, the bitterness softens.
California has been burning for years. When I lived
in LA, I drank water pumped from Colorado. Lemons
from my grandmother’s tree—two orbs, turning in my hands
under the faucet—clear, cold, unfiltered.
Painted lemons swirled across an apron’s hem.
I tucked the yellow wheels, sliced and salted
into blue glass jars. All spring I pulled them
from the fridge, fork-skewered the gelatinous fruit.
Draped them gingerly over cod, sucked meat from thin bones.
Of course, the pain is in the process, absolute.
Who decides anymore what someone owns?
I believe it all mine. I continue to fail.
Slicing more this winter, I suck my thumb’s burning hangnail.

ON OCCUPATION
By Melanie Tafejian, originally published in the Asheville Poetry Review

I. Bukë / Bread 
All afternoon we crack
walnuts, pick shells from meat.
A pyramid of little brains. Glossy
yolks cradled in walls of flour.
Kneading. Sugar water on the stove.
Then the rolling and rolling. The long stick
and flick of the wrist. Baklava.
 
In Kruja, I don’t want to write

about the women, when they jumped,

how they held their babies to their chests,

wind whipping crumbs from their skirts, hair.
I don’t want to write about their tears

or the silence after.
 
In the apartment we watch crows
drop walnuts from six floors up.
Inside, a grandfather cracks two
in the palm of his hand,
feeds the children.

II. Kripë / Salt
Before the wedding we fill
white napkins with salt,
twist then tuck them under bras.

For safety, from the evil eye.  

We dance with pinkies linked, circle tables, twist
hips, dodge young waiters hefting meat,

platter after platter.
Kebabs and pork steaks.

We descend from the mountains

each summer to bathe
in the sea. The iodized whiteness
keeps us alive. 

III. Zemër / Heart

We eat in the butcher’s house.
Outside, dried persimmons hang

like wrinkled worlds,
an orange maze,
hundreds in the window
as we graze off Russian china.
 
I mistake the heart for brain, doused
in red sauce, lost in ricotta-
stuffed cannelloni. The man refuses
to speak a Turkish word
in his house, so we are lost

when it comes to pickles

or eggplant. An empty silence

when asked to pass the (                 )

or the (            ).

No one can decide on komshi, so we say it anyway.
 
Later we drink (            ) and tea

made from wild thyme.
Failing to find the word for thank you,
we settle on grazie.