Matt Fallon
Two Poems
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 & heartish
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 with work forthcoming in The Brooklyn Rail. He is currently completing an MA in English at Rutgers University-Camden and hopes to teach high school upon graduation.