Matthew Gavin Frank
Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of Barolo (The University of Nebraska Press), Pot Farm (forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press), Warranty in Zulu (Barrow Street Press), The Morrow Plots (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books), Sagittarius Agitprop (Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books), and the chapbooks Four Hours to Mpumalanga (Pudding House Publications), and Aardvark (West Town Press). Recent work appears in The New Republic, The Huffington Post, Field, Epoch, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, North American Review, Pleiades, Crab Orchard Review, The Best Food Writing, The Best Travel Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Prairie Schooner, Hotel Amerika, Gastronomica, and others. He was born and raised in Illinois and teaches at Northern Michigan University.
The Sticking-Place, Stripped Screws
Solemn as the coyote, the world
hides its hatred
in its face. Some moon reaches
for mundanity—
the floor fan, maybe, spinning
my wife's new
bedroom cool, a lover collected
like so many
blue feathers at her feet. Or
the spoon
that unlocks the tongue of a tired
sister who lifts
this mundane wind to the ceiling
and therefore
makes weather sweet. Of course
some moon
will be indecisive: tea, table, soup...
Of course
some moon will be jealous, as all
moons are
who aren't the moon, who are tired
of the comparisons:
lightbulb, searchlamp, belly of the earth,
cataract eye.
Sometimes, the owl just wants to die
after a lifetime
of hunting and staying up late when
nothing's open.
Let it go, realizing its wisdom was a gift
from us.
Really, the moon/owl is as dumb as the Earth,
coyote food,
flight no more genius than sleep. Height,
merely genetics.
Sometimes, when the night is this humid,
love can be
another ball-and-socket, and courage, another coffee-
and-pie.
Of course some moon will be vulgar-all
fuck hips
fuck coffee, fuck pie. It's this sort
of solemnity
that confuses joints with other joints, is
this broken knee
and the leg that fights against it
from both sides.