Matt Hart is editor of Forklift Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety.  His work has appeared in Conduit, 88, Ploughshares and Spinning Jenny. He teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

 

 

 

 

 

Song, Not from My Heart

 

My bone-plate head, enormous.

My well-made head in the furnace.

My ferocious maneuver head.

My insistent, pneumatic and billowy head.

It houses the plans for my lemonade stand.

Someday, I’ll write down what I meant, or instead…

My head on the workings of straw.

 

My dastardly head of the present.

My marmalade head over breakfast.

My staring-at-air fish head.

My tripped and hit the pavement head.

There’s someone else in there, and he’s breaking the glass.

If I could I’d forget him and sleep through his shred… 

My head with its numerous saws.  

 

My letter head speaking absurdist.

My spiral bound head of recurrence.

My chipped to bits revision head.

My parakeet fair-weather lollygag head.

I tried to remember the back of my hand.

I tried to remember, but started to bleed.

My head of electrified moth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pet Cricket

 

Paula’s note says, you have to make it

worse before you make it, so I buckle down

and worry the evidence into pieces of a cricket.

 

And now even though the leg still kicks a little

when the lights come on, it just hasn’t been

the same since it separated from his thorax.

 

So while one doctor makes an incorrect diagnosis,

and another squirrels away syringes for the party,

I wait with a glass of Pernod, clicking

 

my heels.  If the guest list contains a hundred

names and all of them arrive at eight hundred hours,

then how fast will the bartenders have to move

 

in order to serve everyone before Paula says

something slick/flashy and shoots me into a coma

of flowers?  For example, The grammar of gardening

 

collapses.  Is it true we’re in a struggle with language?

Because that’s not what I expected at all.  I was hoping

for great white sharks or parking tickets, bad seats

 

at the symphony.  Poor little guy.  How ‘bout some

euphony over here?  He’s fibrillating something awful,

flipping around in a circle.  He’s had it.  Please,

somebody get him some dope for the pain.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rhinoceros

 

Welcome to the odd-toed, fearsome land-version of the hippopotamus.

I think you’re angelic, the way you almost rhyme with dust and serve us

as both runway and pit-stop for scores of those little black birds

who are the messengers of god.  Reading about you I learned the word

keratinous (more later), and I learned that you are non-ruminant, which

means that you neither re-chew your food (even though you eat nothing

but fiber!), nor meditate with hands clasped in prayerful reverence, as

each second the ultra-violets beat down on your hardy, unkillable

skin.  Those horns on your snout parry whatever with heat and

charge—flowers, the wind… On second thought, no, please do not

charge.  I am not a rival male, nor am I a (lost) matador.  I am unimaginable

(judging by the look on your face—lackadaisical, radiant, much muchness),

and I’m wondering at the tire of your neck, the wire of your tail, and also

that which comes from the Latin word cornus and the Greek

word keras, from which we get keratin (a sulfur-based fibrous protein),

the primary ingredient in all sorts of epidermal tissues: hair, skin, feathers

and, yes, you guessed it—horns.  I’d like to see you trash

a lovely home on Cape Cod just because.  I’d pay your airfare, or

better yet, I could help you escape from the zoo.  Do you ever

go over anything in your mind repeatedly the way I do?   Sometimes

I think I don’t matter at all.  Do you ever think at all?  Matter at all?  Worry?

I’d like to be one of those little black birds on your head, or better

just the message he carries: a few words about slouching, a few mumbled

commandments.  The universe is crushing.  Rhinoceros, break it.