TWO POEMS PHILIP MATTHEWS

GLUE

Flies fuck in a rock-candy cloud until they

can't. They fall out
sticky onto the lake,

release their eggs.
Not a blue the sky is.

We are boil-bellied.
We push—dissolve.

We push a button:
drop rockets

onto a far-away X.
What village.

Whatever we thought
in the control panel

light, we chose
to explain to children.

Study reduced to:
"—like with tentacles"

our right to own what we want.

 

HANDLE

The dogs shake off the cold swimming pool water, lie down. You pass the joint to your roommate:
between work, making sandwiches. You don't mind sharing. You bike around shirtless. A bird, a
beep, a rotation of legs. Your shoulders you peel meticulously, soft-boiled quail eggshells. You
Google melanoma. It makes you feel better. You're out of damages insurance, wet cell phone in a
bowl of dry rice. No reception, but you enjoy the luck no one planned, of meeting someone you
know where it happens. Once your grandfather asked you how you liked a newscaster's rack. You
started counting your shoelace holes in your head. He made you uncomfortable. He was a teacher,
told stories about his father shit-drunk in a broom closet, knocking like a construction block trying
to get out. He demonstrated the sound on the kitchen table. You were listening. In the living room,
you watched cartoons. A coyote swung halfway across a canyon, when the manufactured wall he'd
installed deployed: popped up. He slid down the wall into the desert road. Today your hangover rolls
you up. You feel congested. A familiarity much older than you are, —admitting that.
The sound of the screen door; the dogs.