the Red Booth Review

Remember when the world sparkled. How
the gods shone with polish in bygone days,
their glistening munificence shellacking
their golden, self-damned heavens, layers

of enamel glossing over the nimbus
haloing you. How light afoot you gamboled
through the iridescent drifts
of that kaleidoscopic fall. How brilliantly

you played the glockenspiel & winked
at the scherzando & phooey! How
would you ever take a shine to me?
The me reflected everywhere,

from the Studebaker’s buff chrome bumpers
to the once popular stovepipe hats,
back then fashioned from silver & tin.
Against the glint of history, you stand apart,

your face inside the coin jar ever
beaming, ever radiant to this day,
untarnished by the change waxing over you
in a glimmering, shimmering heap.

The fog lifts. You glimpse
the wires holding up
the plane, scuffed wing
tips of angels who guide it along

peeking out from a cardboard
cut-out cloud - that dark
fat one, for instance,
following you. What

did you expect - whirring
propellers of some gray
puddle-jumping albatross
to glide across the sun’s

smiley button face? Up here
home is but a speck
on the glass, your career
even less significant - as if that’s

possible. The drunk
next to you wants to hold
hands for luck, but surely he
sees through the guise

of your humanity.
Way down below,
the runway sticks out its sleek
black tongue to taste

Grandma's fixing a pot
of something rotten for breakfast. It’s Saturday,
& I'm sprawled on the rug, glued to
endless cartoons. “Keep it down. Your dad’s trying
to sleep,” Mom snaps, glaring at me.
I hope that he can, but there’s no way
I’m letting my bitchy, brain-dead
sister switch to her fluffy
pouf show without a fight. Only a dog
could hear her high-pitched
shrieks.
The sonic boom of
Dad awakened shakes the house.
Yanking the belt off his wrinkly, all-night,
post-bender pants, he wants
to know who's first. I bow,
always the gentleman, to my
sibling rival, & the tip of his belt licks the back
of my legs, my head caught in a headlock so tight
I can't squirm loose. Stinking like an abattoir,
Dad finally stops, without giving
little sister as much as a stony glance. She -
who gloats on a floor pillow & watches
The Bugaloos - looks up at me & makes
a dopey face, so I slug her, not hard
enough to turn on the crying channel,
but she still howls. Mom punches
a button on the remote & launches
into her histrionics; Dad guns the Dodge
toward The Blue Moon morning
of pickled eggs & shots. In the silence
that erupts like a brown cloud,
Grandma hollers from the kitchen:
“Who wants oats?”

Matt's first book, Nearing Narcoma, which Joy Harjo recently selected as winner of Main Street Rag’s Annual Poetry Book Award, will be published this fall.

Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barbaric Yawp, G.W. Review, New York Quarterly and other magazines and anthologies.