WES MATTHEWS

Touching Fire

not long ago I was bloodless before the widowing

         flame

              waiting for my hand to masquerade in sweat.

 when I felt these ecstasies of the deadening bone

                freaked & free of glam

I knew this was the response to

to the Sunday school sessions that took

hours beneath my grandmother’s artless

church that taught that only water saves from sin

when you douse

or drink. 

Yes, I’m sure, but I much rather rejoice

that God has let me

drain these two bronze-earth slats from

the bassening cello & frenzy

and has made flame tines only scarlet dragonflies,

     sensuous in the souled goodness,

     helping me wash all these gracious sins

     of mine.

Ode to Vultures

every sacrifice should be in a savannah,

where it’s bastard eat bastard instead. The ground mouths

out a sepulcher of oldgrass and undressed sorrow mimicking

choirboys & crying boys, a broken drum that beckons

unstarved scavengers, those who themselves once bled perhaps. Patron-linened

bowels spare body blues from becoming the end of several hours

& so make peace with what killers could not: the harp of homeless muscles

from impassioned war to gaping riverbank, to muddied-out marksmen footprints

still running to & fro. So when the angels do not come, who is

there to make sure the killing does not fill the peace? Who am I

then to leave Grief many imploded homes? If I were to die here, I’d be but a host

of blood & motherborne bone, making myself a shadow from the wormhole

that I was bestowed—making myself a surviving mother because who is to know

Gospel, yet not at once know a bosom?

                                                                         This perhaps is why I’ve seen many boys

who have nothing but their own pulse to make them men, & by pulse I mean

the neckstrain & drag force visible when someone openeyed dies, their inglorious

shoulderblades becoming inverted land toppling itself down to the sand & nothingness.

but here they lay/lie now without the proper funeral of hands,

& who is to care for them, but the one whose

sole duty it is to do so?

Ode to Couchbeds

a good grandson might ask his grandmother

when will I have a bed to sleep on in your house?

then she might say

when I have worked myself to death.

Wes Matthews is a writer and performer from Detroit, Michigan. He has had multiple publications in the Detroit Free Press and Underscore Review. A 2x national slammer, Wes forges his work with an imaginative eye on the darkness of cultural and historical landscapes, connecting them with personal ideals. He is probably currently on Twitter rambling about how much he hates Twitter.