He knew something about breeding
_____________
Kill Your Anxiety
For Daisy Buchanan
You want dim knowing
so speak husky hum of
garden party fur, mist
on lips that tip back
laughter. Bottle
the green rim
of your voice
made from money
cut by iron hands
and boots that thrust
your face to gold
toilet afterwards, straining
the lavender dry
of already felt things.
You want your veins
to tread his
unattended funeral always
treading unwanted messages
into crumpled paper songs
we’ll burn as rituals
thrown into the pit
of the New Year.
Whisper we’ll never
repeat the past
we’ll always repeat
the past inside
our flesh so full
of other people.
You want to know
the backroom deal
he’s making of
How are you?
Pin the unanswerable
blue glare of heavy
beaded guests. Sag
the history of every
fenceline. Every
eye that streams
from flight must fight
diamond reminders
that shine and hiss
whenever you begin
to have a good time.
You want to melt
into the yawning
orchestral hall of
bells. Hurry
your head into dawn
and crack the plank
of reason. Splinter
from the wet
side of your skin,
pressed and begging
to get out.
______________
Always Unspoken
For Nick Carraway
Instead, I am the rouged glance
at the bottom steps, every day is
a waltz with the dilatory
message, truth like a ripped piece of paper
mulching under my tongue.
I’d like to know what it means to want
too much of the night.
Phrases take shape from bells
of weather, rustle of bird stir
that exults beaks over the damp
earth, worms’ shameless
roil of lawn.
But I say nothing.
I’d like to know how to live
in the skip of bootlegger pebbles,
inside her nape collar of fur.
Bite off the sun
and spit out the green
light of flowers.
I’d like to be your first reason
for waking under the steeple hour,
brass tremble-panic. The weeklong
ledger of necessity you scrawl
against the cuckoo clock mutter
of plastic birds we’d smash
into a life grown involuntary,
urgent as recovering how
the strange can make us familiar
and the fictional, real.
Under some May humming moon,
I will tell you and streetlights
will form a blurred ladder
from your cul-de-sac
and up to Orion
we will climb out
of the pap
and into the milk
of startlement.
___________________________
He knew something about breeding
from Myrtle, to Tom
I’ve been called thick.
A red gleam
bouncing on leather
streets you zip into
your pockets or order
from a QR
code shaped like
mycorrhizal roots
pinned to the loamy
cork of the dive’s
backroom wall.
I’ve been called continuous.
The other woman
who carries flesh
nerves as one smoldering
slab in your mirror
you hammer into
your door, tell
I’ve never felt so open
because you can
walk through a ghost
nob that turns over
faithfully every time
you touch her.
I live on the ashline
of industrial supplies
every time you edit
your cart, proceed to
checkout, place your order
or Google your familiar
Apple click to pay
for what’s hot.
From the highway
you text and drive
me into premonition,
drunk wheat stalks
heap rot promises
of burnt sugar,
blackened chrome,
dumb blue-eyed AI
billboards arching over
one way out.
You want too much
of the world you said
so I repeat Daisy,
repeat the word
because I hate
myself into abstraction,
hate every velvet petal
she means and I can’t
end until you stem
into one deft swipe
at my face,
my nose shattered
like a wine glass
claw dabbing fingers
at the gaslit night.
Let’s get out
you whisper but
giant AI eyes
keep their blue
billboard vigil.
Overripe in noon,
a face hangs like a peach
over sugared asphalt,
advertising a spectacle
off the road that chokes
our desire
into accident.
My mouth ripped
at the corner.
My eyes stiller
than wood
spectacles.
My breast a flap
under breath
still chanting
You can’t live
forever, You can’t live
forever.
______
Colossal
For Gatsby
You think you can
make your house
wink to daylight.
Blaze like a string
of pearls, accounts
that burn intuition
in roadside wires.
Try to sew your eyes
to hers, one double
string to steady her
glance into cups,
lemons, and tulip
wilt. Every tea
an opportunity
to read the future,
the gloss of leaves
that snap off
the flooding sides
of Texas and New Jersey.
Hear the click
of children gathering
grass heat, colossal
weather now slick
as a glass clock tumbling
intricate just past
the sweat of fingers.
Your premature noon
hums deathless
as the casual swell
of your inner child
that pours wingless
furred moths now
one rising yellow body,
one state of emergency
in the New York region,
tire tracks tracing visibility
to the water's edge.
You watch her drive away
without looking back.
Press your ear
to listen for the wet
sound under the sound.
For the deal
living in the ideal,
the I always straining
to push it forward.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
Raw Anyone is Alex Mattraw’s most recent full-length collection of poems (Cultural Society, 2022). She is also the author of We fell into weather (2020), and small siren (2018), as well as several chapbooks. You can find poems from her current projects in The Brooklyn Rail, Dreginald, Interim, and VOLT. A frequent collaborator with other writers and artists, Alex is the founder and curator of the Bay Area multigenre reading series, Lone Glen, now in its fifteenth year.