Enter Slurry

        where’s my auditor been? haven’t seen him
in six months
                     since I licked the concrete passageways
          of the Department of Labor, since I trembled beneath
towers
          of crystal and steel waiting for a shrouded someone
to pry open my jaw
                      and suck out the secrets. now my mucus
           reeks of the bayside, tastes of greenish pennies        I’m lost
           without my morning cup of porridge; even my bowels mistake
the high pitches
                       for a beat, and the cans as they clatter
shatter Mom’s simple tune         so I suck my thumb and wonder
           if they’ll fumigate
                       my apartment with carrot-scented stew vapor
that I can blow a hole through my septum trying to inhale,
           burst a lung
                               in a fit of nostalgia

Deadening

married to a ballerina
swiping through Alcatraz coral
gurgle-choking on foam, all
  
tastes chalky—molting walnuts
shavings so fibrous tucked away
in cheeks armed for winter
  
but yours: pulsating & hearthish
like gargantuan placentas
beckoning me to bathe
  
in my iron bucket of afterbirth
forever as I think
of floating noses monumentally
  
upturned at my consciousness, jagged
with their Picasso topography—
exhaling Latin that I know means
  
my name, but forever
become bedsheet-faulty-chrysalis again:
the ointment of inhabited sacrifice.

Matt Fallon is a poet from northern New Jersey, where he works in his family’s retail business. His poem “COGNODITY” is forthcoming in the November 2026 issue of The Brooklyn Rail. Matt is completing an MA in English at Rutgers University–Camden and spends much of his time in Philadelphia with his boyfriend, Xavier.