Word Breath
My love,
I have kidnapped the gossip of hospital beds and trapped it in a cemetery of air.
I eat back into my head bent with the tombless guilts,
as if the hostage matters more than the patient.
The world is an ambulance and flesh is its oxygen mask.
Godlegs
Talk yourself into bones and pray in puddles leftover by gods. This is the
humanity which I cannot touch.
An immolated dog stands frozen. Ice speaks to animals like insects cross into
cosmetics.
God cannot feel his legs.
Transfused Cold
Shift out the flame: in come the eyes singing a song of wings.
A chorus of why the world cannot be diamonds.
Reflections are an onslaught of traffic. We can only pray the candles will be
spared when the pelicans have passed their time in gunpowder rather than with
wakes.
Light, what have I done? Frozen and dilated,
this old tundra was pulled apart blink by blink. It was eaten by the deadbolt and
sentenced as an apparition with locks dripping from its seams.
Then we fed it to the spines for the sake of birth.
Birth is a penniless dance atop the graves of fall.
I said I’m a saint.
Light Carvings
Keep the lamppost lit with scars across its holy throat and carve another hand
into the bridge.
In the distance, an engine bottoms out on bliss and succumbs to the grudge of arthritis. This engine swallows the bridge whole,
it swallows it into fingers,
eating the light, absence, kings, and all.
Matthew Coleman was born in Buffalo, NY, which is where he currently resides. He is finishing up a BA in English and creative writing at SUNY Buffalo State and is interested in obtaining his MFA in poetry. His work has been featured in Mused and in various SUNY publications.
Cover Photo: Adrian Sifre (https://www.flickr.com/photos/adriensifre/)