Melanie Rae Thon

A love song in three movements.

As If Fire Could Hide Us explores the expansiveness of consciousness and compassion through and beyond the human body.

A twelve-year-old girl slips out a basement window, steals a bike, and sets off on a perilous adventure. Injured and slowly bleeding out, Orelia enters a vast, spectacularly animate environment where she senses the limits of self disintegrating, her being entangled with the forest.

A prison guard and member of the strap-down team witnesses a painfully prolonged execution and is delivered to a heart-cracking sense of identification with the ones he’s killed. Every grieving mother is his own. Any man might be himself, his closest friend, his brother.

An organ donor’s body is restored and resurrected through the bodies of multitudes. Spiritually and physically, one human being becomes many. Everything in the cosmos is intertwined and interchangeable. Embracing this awareness may bring fear or euphoria — desolation, peace, despair, rapture.

Excerpt — “Orelia, from ever,” at Literary Hub

Excerpt — “As Birds Vanish: A Love Song,” at Conjunctions

Interview with David Naimon at Tin House

There are three ascending levels of how one mourns: with tears — that is the lowest — with silence — that is higher — and with song — that is the highest.
 — Hasidic teaching

Silence & Song is a diptych, two long lyric fictions hinged by a short prose poem. Inspired and informed by biology, physics, music, history, intimate violence, and miraculous resilience, all three pieces move from mourning to song. The primary speakers in these fictions contemplate human and environmental fragility, but are also besieged by evidence of infinite creative abundance: the eggs of shrimp that lie dormant for decades, the sophisticated symbolic language of honeybees, the ability of the creosote to live 10,000 years, the astonishing resurgence of wildlife in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

In “Vanishings,” a woman who works with children at risk in Tucson, Arizona imagines the experiences of immigrants trying to cross the blistering expanse of the Sonoran Desert. Rosana’s compassion is heightened by her personal history: the loss of her brother and sister in a car accident when they were children. She envisions the precarious existence of the Good Samaritan, Lewis Rohe, a man who stops to help a 14-year-old boy who has stolen his mother’s car and rolled it down an arroyo. In his confusion and terror, the boy shoots the man three times, leaving him critically injured. Rosana’s poem — her conflation of stories; her lucid evocations of hummingbirds, black holes, saguaros, elf owls, problem bears, and lost children; her insistence on hope — is a love letter, a prayer to this stranger whose suffering illuminates and transforms her own sorrow.

“Translation,” the short hinge of the collection, describes a moment of transcendent nonverbal communication between young children in a multilingual literacy center in Salt Lake City.

The convergence of two disparate events — a random murder in Seattle and the nuclear accident at Chernobyl — catalyzes the startling, eruptive form of “Requiem: home: and the rain, after.” Narrated in first person by the killer’s sister and plural first person by the “liquidators” who come to the Evacuation Zone to bury entire villages poisoned by radioactive fallout, “Requiem” navigates the immediate trauma of murder and environmental disaster; personal and global devastation; unexpected grace; and the remarkable recovery of the miraculously diverse more-than-human world.

Imagining what it is like to be someone [something!] other than oneself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.
 — Ian McEwan

Missing: seventeen-year-old Kai Dionne and his dog Talia.

The search for these two spans a single day, morning twilight to late evening, from the time Kai leaps in a half-frozen river to save the dog to the hour he and Talia are recovered. They could be anywhere, wet and wandering in the woods or trapped by ice under the surface. Each person who comes to the river brings his or her secret needs and desires; each has known loss, and all are survivors: a childless mother grieves for her son and daughter; a starved boy seeks himself; and a man who shot his father recalls a tender, intimate night “when the father was kind, and not afraid, and not angry.” Kai and Talia belong to, and are loved by, a whole community. As strangers work together toward a single cause, they become family — bound by love not only to the ones lost, but to all who gather.