Matt Mullins

They love me
this means I'm beautiful
because they love me
I'll always be beautiful
...

One day he will come into the bathroom
to watch you use the blade. And at five
or six or however old he still won't have
the right words, but what he'll be looking for
...

Forget if you will the flowers
and gowns and suits of music;
forget the priest or rabbi
or judge and see only these
...

Chinatown: a neon mantis.
Hailstones tapping a
Mandarin braille of love.
...

The week you were born
eighty-some people died in Waco, Texas
the wrong finale to a long stand-off
between Branch Davidians and the ATF
...

You once told me poetry
knocks on your door
at 6 a.m. and that flags
are killer when they fly
...

You dream of naked skin
against the water in us:

How we turn our faces to the air
...

Good morning: and spit curls the half
fractured way of a moon grown soft
to crack like a rotten egg milking
over this dawn’s slow horizon:
...

This flesh is
as we conceive

each sparkling pin
...

We kiss to flamenco
on your kitchen radio

your eyes open
...

What hurts most is not your forgetting
that unforgettable tune,
but the searching, the impossibility,
of actualized need ruining itself
...

How is it that death loves soup
best here in my kitchen, drinking alone
with a pot bubbling on the stove?
...

Twilit silence strung between the spent
light and the darkness gathering
...

I have none to speak of
nor does my father
but my mother's body
is a roadmap of sharp turns
...

Luminous seconds falling before
the alarm that always becomes

The darkness tumbling to an edge set
...

First, you die. Then I choose the place and time
to brush away the dry leaves, rolling aside
the note-heads of pill-bugs and curled centipede clefs
testing the edge of your guitar with the calloused
...

She is twisted around me in the bedroom's green curtained shadow
all is limbs, hair, skin.

There are cars this morning, wheels, as always, sighing on pavement.
...

You are not Lady Godiva looking
through her closet for something
to wear out on the town with your lover
on New Year's Eve, but the daughter
...

Parked in our driveway, home after
spending the evening with good friends
grilling food and drinking beer: I'm staring
through the windshield at our house lit up
...

He counts time to the metronome slashes
of white center-line that refuse to fall into song
as his headlights switch on the amplified eyes
of deer powered up to spring into the full
...