Poetry By
Matt Britton
Published on: 6/23/2010
Across the Street
There's a man sitting, sometimes, on his balcony, with the little iron railing. He has a chair, a kind of canvas and plastic, and he eats the food on his plate. Tomatoes, oil and bread. Small black fish. Everything still oily from the sea, and the small fried seeds, fenugreek and mustard.. It's like a painting, his autistic clothing rumpled, his green army jacket. The warm, foreign food on a white plate. Two thursdays ago, the kids downstairs were yelling, banging on their door to be let in. I stood at my railing as he watched them for a while, then spit, nailed one of them on her hand. A few minutes later, the father came out, very angry, shouting up at the old guy with his crappy little jacket. He just grew quiet like someone who repairs bicycles or delivers fuel from a truck, who has done his small work. Eventually it started to rain, and I went inside. When night came it ate everything except the greasy moon with its slice of tomato.
Published on: 3/5/2010
A Thought
My grandmother at seventy-five was still a giant of depression dinners, potato salad with cornflakes or capers, anything left in the icebox, but three years later she was senseless. She would tell me to take off the red hat I had not worn since I was a child. Gods like old men fall down the stairs into language and its rough taste, their meanings splintered like shin-bones. They dream of workhouses, plenty-houses full of children and harvest dinners and end up fumbling in the garage, between the baling wire and the canning-jars. When father dies we will take a body to a white office on Larimer street. This when he spits for us flowers of blood, looks in the toilet and sees a piece of his heart.
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