TWO POEMS
I NEVER KEPT A DOLLAR PAST SUNSET
As a boy, I stole buffalo nickels from my grandmother’s top drawer
& put them in a muriel cigar box & buried it
under the thick mud bank protecting the creek behind her house.
After she died, I drank the water from my cupped hands, while mucus drained
down Keith Richards’ throat after doing a line of coke cut with his father’s ashes.
The things that made us will always find a way to crawl back into our grieving mouths.
There is a corner of a road where daffodils bloom like wildfire at the peak of spring,
through Ohio snow, & the head cheerleader of my high school wrapped her car
around a tree protecting the perennials back in ’06. Every March, her mother steals
the bulbs from the earth & stuffs them behind the doorbell of her house.
This isn’t to say everything we lose will eventually find its way back to us;
this is just to say I still taste flecks of copper when I swallow.
EAST COAST PSALM FOR A GOODBYE
on the edge of cape cod, my mother & i spread my grandmother’s
ashes, & said farewell to the wall of her embers dancing in the boston air
above the atlantic ocean. on the one-year anniversary my grandmother’s death,
my mother carries me to the rim of the cuyahoga river, holds my body in-between
her teeth. she throws me into the water, through the bed of ash, & wonders why i can’t swim.
**Author’s Note: This is an excerpt from a poem forthcoming in Half Mystic Journal in 2020.**
Matt Mitchell
Matt Mitchell is a writer from Ohio. His words can be found now, or very soon, in venues like BARNHOUSE, NPR, Gordon Square Review, Frontier Poetry, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among others. He’d love to talk to you about basketball.
Twitter: @matt_mitchell48