an eyelid twitch, a nervous cough become longing tells his Wild Bill eyes smoothed into blandness an old habit learned and worn between fat moments when everything moves too fast for any but the narrowest openings a wilderness he lived in with a few other solitary hostiles shooting at trespassers as would-be settlers his sleepy look fooled even some who knew better by now each player was […]
Boxed here, her room, fruit punch served as breakfast, no TV, bad reception, books on architecture, more on trees, runes, in dust. The mattress, as ever, unshaped to my skin, bones; and so the pain goes, comes in waves. Now the radio, its waves, long and lonely, and she and I in every note. Each point, the scan finds some instrument, some aria, far flung, from the far reaches […]
The sun flares over the bay, its haze a portal — to where I left a skin behind: under cliffs where a windbreak stood, catching barbecues, a waft of hot dog fat, skrikes of kids, open-mouths, white noise, broken kites, tugging pants for treats, tugging nan’s, dads tugging hands of ozone-scorched pink, where cirrus streaks cream on blue from gadabouts, tilted faces singed around sunblock and shades. A photo […]
I’m 9 and behind the wheel of our green and white ’55 Olds. I start to check the mirrors, but my father tells me not to worry what’s coming from behind– though I know he always does. The Belt curves around to the right near the Bay Parkway exit and I see houses and parks and empty lots in the distance and people walking on Shore Road, dressed for the […]
Grinning, disheveled, leaning against yellowest willow, a cut on your shin, smell of dead leaves You step from cabs, bent knee birthed in streetlight You half-sleep in hammocks under ruddy overcast You should be by the willow, disheveled I can’t put dreams back where they find me Matthew Byrne received his MFA from University of Montana in 1999. He has been published in some journals, and had a poem […]
1. She dreams of dreams— O, my chinchilla, my arabesque, my otherworldly worldly, my bud blossom blossom bud, O. 2. She is the window staring back. Sometimes, she sees constellations; the stars don’t come out. Nor does she, until coming home. 3. Instead, bacon grease flecks her wrist. Her watch smudges. No one hears her blink, nor flinch. 4. I pinch her thoughts, making sure she’s asleep. […]
[part of The Fixer series] I’ll come through later, sweep the scene clean. You’ll be safe in South America by the time they sound the alarm. That’s the professional service ethic to expect when you hire the Quicker Picker Upper. It’s the forest primeval out there. Society’s reverting to a brutal state of nature. So find your fortune, cash out, set up in a country that is skeptical […]
I’ve put aluminum foil up on all my windows, blocked all sunlight, crawled inside myself, found nothing but used condoms, crumpled beer cans, buckets full of half eaten fried chicken bones, delinquency notices written in red ink, my sad credit score under my pillow like a pistol, skin of lost lovers gathered in the corner of my room, hair nests of new ones tangled in bedsheets freshly soiled with perfume […]
even if the weather is warm. Eighteen wheelers shake the bridge, the water is a corpse. There’s a woman I haven’t seen in weeks, there’s a party tonight, at least that’s what I remember from last year. A roasted pig with an apple shoved in its mouth, tubs of iced cheap beer, a pharmacy on the table, hangover sex in the shaking morning, tomorrow I will rise alone to the […]
As the van drew away, I thought about my bird, Never expecting that I’d seen the last of him — or my home. Young as I was, I thought my life would never change; blue, Open skies ought to be permanent. I’d met death — Nearly everyone learns what it’s like to feel a corpse grow stiff, Exquisitely, beneath your fingers — but those were fish. These rooms Carried the […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 