Awakening

I.

Some nights when I’m half-asleep,

I hear Mama’s voice say my name.

Other times, it’s Daddy, calling out.

I awake, half-expecting to find  

myself again in the back yard, hiding

behind the overgrown honeysuckle

intertwined and clinging to chain-link.

Mama holds open the kitchen door.

Or Daddy unlatches the fence gate.

And I, a half-wild child, emerge,

long dark hair tangled with burrs,

palms and knees stained red with clay.

I'm Hungry

The coffee maker

and microwave died.

The oven is treacherous.

I haven’t washed dishes

in four months.

I have one pot, one spoon, and one knife

I use over and over again.

I’m subsisting on peanut butter

sandwiches and cold canned food.

My stomach won’t stop growling.

Sometimes, I wake at night, eating

my bed sheets.

© Ami Mattison

For G-Man's Flash Friday 55

When We Are Onions

If you pull back

the layers, toss them

aside, you’ll find nothing

at the center.

It’s a joke.

And it makes you cry.

Some people need

the pieces to be

symmetrical, but me,

I just chop and chop

into sloppy bits.

It’s for the taste anyway.

Not that I would eat one raw.

But in Georgia during summer

sliced Vidalias and fresh tomatoes

appear on supper plates.

But both of those are side dishes,

and this is about the center

of it, which can’t be located.

What lies between us could be

a field or a river or just a dusty

country road.

But instead, it’s complicated and striated

and so abstract that I have no idea

what I’m talking about.

Still, I have to say, this not-knowing

a thing is what makes mothers weep

and lovers sigh.

It’s potent.

Kinda like those kitchen fumes

that make eyes tear up

even when there’s nothing

particularly sad.

At the center of us goes unnamed,

not really nothing or a thing,

but a no-thing.

But then, I have no idea

what I’m talking about.

© Ami Mattison

Photo courtesy of DRB62

Privilege

The crux of our middle-

class lives folds into every day

items, puzzle blocks we buy when

some of the pieces are missing. So much

depends on the picture of necessity,

desire and the pieces

we accumulate: cars, furniture, appliances,

collections of what we need

and what we want, fitted into

wooden frames and bricks, mortared

into homes we own. How lovely

those drapes are and that landscape

hanging on the wall. The precise

measurements of how we live

depends upon what’s missing

from the painting. Cars, furniture,

appliances, the stuff of what

we pay for, counting our gains,

our losses, wanting

to balance the ledger

of who we are and what

we believe we deserve.

© Ami Mattison 

Revival

I cut my wrist with an Exacto blade,

made an incision to bilge the blue vein

so I might see my blood, reassure myself

it was pulsing.

When the wound bled wet and red,

I wrapped it tight with a kitchen cloth,

guarded my sleep throughout the night,

and swore never again to come so close

to killing.

Absent-minded

Death is not a reality, but the absence of a reality. ~Thomas Merton

They say I’m not dead yet,

but surely this is hell.

Not the inferno they preach,

but a sterile hallway, narrow

and lengthening beyond

my poor eyesight.

They say at the end of it,

there is light, but I’ve  been there

and I can tell you, it’s a white wall

decorated with an oil-painted face

of God, hung to remind  me of his absence,

how even he’s abandoned this place.

Jesus Weeps

How many times I died

I lost count.  With every plea,

I gave a piece of me.

Water into wine, men’s madness 

cast upon swine—miracles

emerged from flesh,

blood, tooth, bone.

She was the only one

who loved me.

I died a thousand deaths,

was reborn when she kissed

my feet with her hair.

© Ami Mattison

For G-Man's Good Friday Flash 55

Stars on Alabama

We lived our little drama.

We kissed in a field of white.

And stars fell on Alabama last night.  ~Mitchell Paris

Oh, those stars over Alabama.

How they fell in tender light

upon the fields of soft,

white buds, plucked

by your dark, scarred fingers

to show me the stubborn

seeds nestled there.

How the moon creases

the ochre sky tonight,

how I can taste red clay

in the cracks of my lips

takes me back to you,

Ridin' the Blue Train

Better catch that steel-wheeled ride

‘fore it takes off and slides on down

those tracks ‘cuz it’s a one way ticket,

and there ain’t no goin’ back.

Jump that rail and don’t tell Mama

cuz she don’t ‘bide by rattlin’ rooms

and shakin’ hips, but baby that song makes

you move in all the right ways of wrong.

Easy as her silence is

No one knows that she talks

to me, spills her days in lovely

chatter-songs that wake me

every morning and bed me at night.

With others, silence marks her

as aloof or elusive or even enigmatic,

but she’s not really a question.

After Her

I am underground where the roots

of trimmed conifers strangle water from clay

and daylight filters through half-drawn window blinds,

still dusty with the lives of strangers. My grey face

reflected in that window becomes gaunt and ghosted.

Outside the cinderblock walls, ambulances

and fire trucks streak towards the hospital

or away. Red flashes light up the night and whining

sirens wrench my dreams into deafening wails.

When we are gods

the terrible eye turned into

a vertical slit, squinting

at the straight, neat lines of who

we believe we are.

hard dark crossbars above us and below us.

I, I , I, we chant.


Ami Mattison

If They Knew

The wide-eyed moon lights

winter’s midnight sky.  

One word changes the season,

the hour, the shape of the moon.

You cannot say, it’s cold.

You must let the cardinal, clinging

to a bare branch outside a frost-

kissed window tell them the freeze

is almost over.

Domestic Disturbance

Upstairs neighbors are at it again.

Stomping, thrown objects, and loud

thuds shake my ceiling.

Get out! Get out of here! She screams.

But he won’t leave, not until he’s taken

a piece of the wall and her with him.

Later the ceiling will shake again

headboard thumping, bed springs

creaking so many terrible moans.

© Ami Mattison

For G-Man's Flash Friday 55

Photo Courtesy of Grand Velas Riviera Maya

If you want it to burn

Gather the thin, fragile lies, slipping

from her lips, like dry twigs fallen

beneath low-lying branches.

Strike flint against the bone

of your bitterness. Set aflame

the recanted kindling and blow

hot breath across the splintered

wood, seasoned with mistrust.

Stoke it with your anger and watch the fire

burn steadily down to cold and dying embers.

Place the ashes on your head, smear

them across your lips, so you might

remember her kiss.

© Ami Mattison

Plague

My blackened shroud

Burns to ash, wind-blown

Across deserts

And oceans

It summons a plague of rats

Gnawing on marrow and grief

Ami Mattison

A Shadorma for One Stop Poetry's Monday Form

Of Miracles

Commuting cars along 13 Mile Road
sound like the rush of the ocean waves,
tumbling at low tide, and I am taken
to the seashore where you combed
for shelled treasures and washed them
in wet salt. Your bare feet awash
in the surf, you bowed your head
to the sun.

Time never curls back, and I will never
again stand on the edge of the world
between earth and ocean nor burn
beneath your radiance, your smile,
curving and lifted when you look at me.

I am land-locked now, living in a crummy
basement, bereft of sun and sky and you,
wrapping daylight around my dank nights.

My grief wanders there into early morning,
stands in the middle of the road and looks up
towards blackness.

I do not believe in miracles or accidents,*
only the star, perhaps a planet, peeking
through a sudden parting of clouds

and the swerving car, horn sounding long,
wheels braking hard, but too hurried to stop.
I watch the tail lights fade into the distance,
return to my basement where I sleep hard
and do not dream of seashores.

Ami Mattison

* Excerpt by Sylvia Plath

Touchdown Jesus

Lightning struck Jesus, a stone bust

ascending from a fountain of faith

along I-75 in Ohio.  His arms, six stories

high and stretching towards heaven,

he was a joke among locals. He suffered

eighteen-wheeler exhaust and finger-pointing.

His pleading expression was immoveable

until God’s jagged fire set him aflame

and burned him to the ground.

The Moon's Eyelid

They have been speaking

for years, telling her who

she is and what she should do.

Mostly, she ignores them.

The new doctor asks

if she has a superpower

the doctor should be aware of.

She tells the doctor: The moon’s eyelid

is wide open tonight. I can see that much.

The doctor nods, makes a note in the chart.

A Mother's Lament

Light bulbs blew in room after room

while the houseplants withered and

died. I closed the window blinds

against the summer sun.

But I couldn’t block out the sounds

of the neighbors’ children. Their squealing

laughter interrupted my mid-day sleep,

and the high-pitched peals shattered

my glass dreams of holding tight

your small, live body.

© Ami Mattison

For G-Man's Friday Flash 55


Photo courtesy of cheishichiyo

Inevitable

I cleave to winter, unready

for the rains, washing away

all traces of the seasons we witnessed

together. My unclean palms pressed

in prayer, I am penitent, mumbling

offerings to the gods for second chances,

redemption from the ghost-bones of grief.

Late Winter, Detroit

Robins return

before spring

wraps warmth

around the city

the cold core

of abandoned fealty

thaws to mud

softens with songs

diverted

she’s high
on too much

coffee

too many

cigarettes

and no sleep

hands hard-wired

to the steering

wheel, she

accelerates

rounds

the mountain

curve

wonders

what if

she took

the metal barrier

with her