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.