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Progress of History
The televisions talk only of bad endings.
Sitcoms irradiate spin-offs that just get worse:
a man runs and is shot, another doesn’t
and is shot—this infinite destruction
slowly effaces the lines between nothing
and us all.
The furniture has jaws; at noon the house cats
give up on life and take the houseplants
with them; the microwave is the starting line
attached to my pipes—hopefully far away.
This march toward inevitable shit
is like your life, okay mine too.
Except everyone I know is getting younger,
to undo the steps they’ve laid till now—
60-year-olds take up jogging, stay out
until dawn. They get a little thinner,
like a razor has taken something from them.
From Early Art (2006) a chapbook with Turtle Ink Press
(First appeared in Chatauqua Literary Journal and was featured on Verse Daily)
Earthbound
Damascus, 2008
The doves think the hawk a human invention–
some slow-circling plane, hand-fletched and wheeling
through the sky–the city has given them technological minds.
Boys toss bread crumbs to the rock doves in the square,
a prettier word than pigeon, but they taunt with curt bird
and cluck pink tongues against fresh teeth.
Mornings are easy and full of thick milk,
the boys and the pigeons and the bread and their mothers–
this square their terrarium of contentment.
Their brothers smoke and lean against walls,
rouse for women or to rush at the pigeons
and startle them to flight.
And the hawk reels, more sinister than sons,
but lighter, unburdened by its hunger–
hollow blot of want against the sun.
Forms of Flight
In Damascus I watch a dervish whirl and count my breath.
In Cambridge, I offer my love’s name to pagan fire. Paper birds alight.
Each turn of the dervish is my father.
Like you, my father has not come home.
Each paper bird an internal organ, her name the accelerant.
After the dervish comes the feast: the cigarettes, the astringent drink.
The artichoke mistakes the butter for my father.
The Arak mistakes cold water for her name and grows clouds.
After fire comes the potluck. I cannot swallow its spice.
I sometimes mistake emptiness for hunger. But not tonight.
My father’s distance cannot be measured with instruments.
My debts cannot be accounted by his profession.
To speak her name is to suffocate.
My lips mistake her name for incantation.
The sheikh thinks alcohol brings visions.
The paper birds think sacrifice a form of flight.
But this night is too cold to reconcile
even breath to sky.
Poem to the Communication Satellites
What a burden to carry the voices
of millions of humans—specks to you—
shouting, somehow, their weak
and varied screeches across atmospheres
with thick vocal chords to penetrate the low-hung clouds.
How you shuffle through the dozen tongues trained
to reach your earth-sloped ears—and still, whole continents
are silence, like they never devised a speech to break
their planet’s bounds.
And what games they must play:
as cities flicker quiet—neighbors strewing nets across the sky
to suture their voices to the decaying ground.
Imagine their words reflected back to them—
whole cities of echoes you can’t see inside,
whole cities of darkness and no words get out.
Matthew R. Hotham 