BRUTALIST SONNET
A gray June and a broken porch, the sun lost and the neighbor biking. / With the grandeur of two corpses thrown in a grave our spines fold into one. / Inside we feel vaguely moved, but after we are quiet, and we don’t address the dying bird caged within our chests. / I visit the graveyard to keep voices alive, and in this decaying summer I find not solace, not comfort, but grim reality. / My parents are buried like brickwork, one casket atop another, fused together by the dirt, the graveyard a foundation of wood and wax I bury my memories and bootsoles in. / When I die, I will do so in small, squarely framed boxes, like the quiet doll of a child that I am. / My tired kintsugi lungs will collapse into themselves like inflatable slides, and the great bruise of the milky way will settle on my stiff skin like dust on an old photo. / A hard year I’ve had of it. / I’ve been gardening, see, my skin caked in sweat and the rose petals all dry, so let me lie, and lend me now your soft, uncracked hands. / Exsanguinate me. / Let me of my blood, drain my tucked away veins of their last warmth, pull them from the house of my body like worn-out heating ducts. / Make of me a piecemeal mound, make of my heaping remains and heap of veins a new kind of art, gather my scattered parts and make of this mess something whole. / Sweep my scraps into russet collage. / Leap into me with such force that even the sky must relent its grasp and for just a moment I’ll hold you entirely all that exists you and I in something like cloud of leaves.
Dirge at Dusk
For the dim day. For the long night. For the night pooled in flower pots. For the night that glows under watchful starts, under the half-built moon. For the night on your fingernails, in your downturned pupils. Your hair is the glittering filigree, our hands the moonlit arabesque. For the stars that draw down. For this panopticon we guard, and call the night sky. For the shy god’s handrail that we call a galaxy. For this second story balcony. For the galaxy of breath, loose from my lips. For the galaxy from yours. For how we watch our breath dance away together like proud silver horses. For how beautiful they gallop. For how quickly they fade.
Matthew Gustafson has many ghosts stuck in his throat. At first, the poems were meant to be like hot tea, washing the ghosts away and soothing his windpipe, but now he realizes all he's done is give the ghosts a microphone. When not tending to the catacombs of his throat, Matt has found time to graduate from Lafayette College and Stony Brook University, be the Poetry Editor at Folklore Review, and publish poems in The Shore, Eunoia Review, Beaver Magazine, and elsewhere.