I

You cannot say it without meaning

something particular and peculiar.

It’s a lonely syllable, forgotten

in a child’s mouth, out of tune

with the cavernous song of you.

It overshadows. It is

a tree among stumps—

its top branches,

its sturdy roots,

stretching outwards,

away from itself.

It dresses in an emperor’s clothes,

likes to be  dominant and predominant 

upon the tongues of everyone. 

Blue in Detroit

Blue is patches of sky, hovering over

Detroit at the cusp of fall, hung by God

for a people hungry for wider living

and open spaces, not this crumbling

concrete and burnt out houses across the street

from the elementary school playground.

That blue will become a polluted orange-pink,

a strange beauty that’ll make your eyes water

and fill you with longing for familiarity,

not this city of strangers who never loved me.

I’m not seeking pity.

Victoria Hernandez Dances

They say I never dance

at school assemblies—all the boys

wearing pressed and tucked shirts

and the girls, their hair pinned back

with clips and bows. But they don’t know

I dance with her in unlit spaces.

Under the bleachers in the corner,

she takes my hand and twirls me around,

embraces my waist with her thin, dark arms,

and silently dips me backwards.

Her body becomes a comma, and my heart,

sound flooding my ears, pauses when

she pulls my body so close to hers,

then steps away, and I breathe

the Salsa beats again, watch her hips sway,

a primal music pulsing in my veins.

She burns deep,

deeper in my belly. 

And no one knows

how our love is beats 

and melodies and doesn’t need 

to speak or be seen.

You never dance, they say. But I do.

I dance and dance and dance.

© Ami Mattison

I want a poem

I wanna poem to tell me

it’ll be okay.

I want a poem to say

all the stray words

stuck in my throat.

I want to toke on it, roll

the bits into thin paper, light

the end, and inhale long.

Yeah, I want a strong antidote

of meter and rhyme, telling me

this time hopelessness is just

a long word for lost faith.

So gimme a poem.

Show me how the grey expanse

gives way to cerulean.

Give me words I can chew,

metaphors I can swallow,

images I can drink.

Cover me with a blanket

crocheted with rhyme.

I need the measure of poetry,

to rid me of this stilted, prose life.

I’m holding a blade to my neck,

and that’s not a metaphor.

So please, gimme a poem.


©Ami Mattison

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.