Danielle Mckinney, Mercy (detail), featured in AGNI 103
A Story
Pre-Raphaelite hair, a little black dress
and fuck-me pumps, my poems drawing
actors, dancers, painters to my Village digs,
books, opera tickets, the Met.
Someone else is living the life I thought I’d get.
When I whistle, a white horse
in Central Park lifts its head, wickering.
I lie down like Nebucadnezzer to graze.
My lips kissing a subway grate
five hundred miles away, years too late,
a forelock whisks my cheek.
Melissa Green
Melissa Green is the author of three collections of poems—The Squanicook Eclogues (W. W. Norton & Co.), Fifty-Two (Arrowsmith Press), and most recently Magpiety: New and Selected Poems (Arrowsmith)—and two memoirs, Color Is the Suffering of Light (Norton) and The Linen Way (Rosa Mira Books). She has received the Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her work has appeared in, among other places, AGNI, Little Star, The Paris Review, and The Best American Poetry, and is the subject of a volume edited by Sumita Chakraborty, Soundings: On the Poetry of Melissa Green (Arrowsmith Press). Green lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. (updated 4/2026)
Read Sumita Chakraborty’s interview with Melissa Green at The Los Angeles Review of Books.