Adrian Matejka

It ends because the beginning won't jumpstart
again: red smudge of a mouth, lipstick everywhere

the afterthought a comet leaves on its way
out. What makes this moment unfold like a fine
...

I lied when Pops asked, but I'll admit it now. I did touch the blue egg to see if, somehow,
it felt as much like the sky as it looked. The egg: speckled in its twiggy nest, eye level to
8-year-olds, perfect & off-limits like the Baoding balls on Pops' desk. We tried to find
its mom, but the finches scattered when we came near. One twittered the alarm from a
...

That was the week
it didn't stop snowing.

That was the week
five-fingered trees fell
...

In nyc, we stalked fishes
in filets of sounds: delivery
engines & ashy doors
...

This sunlight on snow.

This decrescendo
of covered stumps & brush —
stop for it.
...

blacks painted onto bricks & split vinyl on the East Side,
jaws as tight as window locks with the curtains drawn
& behind that diligent fabric: blacks already tucked
into homemade forts—folding chairs, wobbly backbones
...

A Schwinn-ride away: Eagledale Plaza. Shopping strip of busted
walkways, crooked parking spaces nicked like the lines
on the sides of somebody's mom-barbered head. Anchored
by the Piccadilly disco, where a shootout was guaranteed every
...

The first space shuttle launch got delayed until
Sunday, so we had to watch the shuttle's return
to Earth in class instead—PS113's paunchy black
& white rolled in, the antennae on top adjusted
...

after Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

In the wobbly pirouette between song
& dust, dog-nosed living room windows
& a purple couch that should have been curbed
...

—Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, 2016


1.

Just off of Highway 12, Sandburg's signature
of time & eternity: the muggy marshes
...

There's a father sleeping it off in every master bedroom
of the cul-de-sac the morning after, so Saturday
morning is a snooze. The moon is still out, eyeballing
the quiet street like Sun Ra did his Arkestra. Somebody
...

—after "Trumpet," Jean-Michel Basquiat


the broken sprawl & crawl
of Basquiat's paints, the thin cleft
...

When 213b finally opens in a crack of yellow linoleum,
Garrett comes out with the left side of his afro as flat
as the tire that used to be on his mom's car & the stuck
snick of the cheap door locking behind him sounds exactly
...