(Matthew Henriksen)
Matthew Henriksen lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he co-edits Typo, publishes Cannibal Books, and curates The Burning Chair Readings. Other recent poems appear in Realpoetik, Front Porch, and The Cultural Society. Two chapbooks, Another Word from DoubleCross Press and Only Grows from Cue Editions, are forthcoming, along with a feature of previosly unpublished poetry and fiction by Frank Stanford in the next issue of Fulcrum.
Baby
I
Bring the fatted worm to the altar
I will pin down the skin
The body opened
What you imagined
An orphan cannot say his father is no man
A worm cannot say
No No Don’t do this
But the fatted baby can say
When he is older I don’t remember
What my father cut from me
II
At the back of each eye beyond my death
I see a future without automobiles
Save two chestnut Ford Mavericks
In an abandoned salvage yard
Well after my child has died I will see the sun
As it will be on the backs of those cars
In the beginning of this new
And ancient and only reality
III
I can hardly bring myself to flip the blinker
I can hardly turn the wheel right
If I break down
Like the sun weeps
My child will hear the arietta
In Beethoven’s last sonata
And an image will strike my child’s eye
Optimistic beyond repair
That day will squeeze
All that is holy from the body
And set it down like a fish on a rock
Under the sun’s violent love