Five Poems
By: Matt McBride

For B. Precious are your teeth the frame of your plastic hair your perfectly round eyes drawn by a sharpie marker. You are a bobble-head genius the abstract of personhood a less endearing Pinocchio without blemish and yet somehow horrible in your savagely generic beauty. You collapse like an old barn under the weight of your innocence. You are angelic in your boredom. Please, write for me another epistle of gibberish; sing to me a psalm from your plagiarized bible.

Snow Forgets the Landscape Flakes of glass soften, sink through our dreams, frozen letters of rain. Cars swell into sleeping ghosts of young elephants. The air is empty with sediment— I am immune to memory.

Night What is held under the auspices of night? The velvet streetlight? An old man’s viscous coughing? What do you have to say for yourself, pigeon bones in your pockets and a mouth full of paper? It feels as if someone’s pulled back the curtains of meat and shown you, standing organless and naked on this poorly cobbled street. The moon never knew you. Why are you screaming? You’ll wear your bones out. Remember the dream of the red-winged angel. Remember she held you and sang: the one about being lonely, the one about the black king of moths returning triumphant from hell.

Overcast and clouds speak with the voices of dolls. Soot-colored pigeons billow back into smoke as they leave their wire. My gut is a rag I wring each morning. On the sill rests a mason jar humming with flies. The soul leaks a little from the edges of my shadow.

Cymbal Crash of the Moment When You Realize a Dream Is a Dream The people across the street are actually from a projector. Two cars collide with such slowness the accident can’t be real. Looking up, you see that the sky really isn’t the sky but rather an enormous flock of blue cranes flying backwards. When you reach to the woman standing next to you, she slides off your touch as her poorly-propped body falls over. The colorful graffiti is illegible. Shadows are spills of milk. You grab a handful of shards from a broken bottle, and when you wake up, it’s this poem.