Matt Thomas is a smallholder farmer and occasional community college teacher. His work has appeared recently in Cleaver Magazine, Bluepepper, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly and is upcoming in Dunes Review and Bear Paw Arts Review. He and his partner live in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

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House Carpenter

I heard it while taking my morning walk.
Some caught breath escaping the caulk, tar, brought
on the morning horseshoe crabs and glass.
Was it your voice?
More likely my own, the worst kind of leaver;
the kind that stays
and looks back from a distance.
Your picture on the refrigerator,
a wide salty smile
like a hand over the mouth of my apology.
I filled the ice trays
imagining the clunk of cubes sunken in a glass,
as the sound of you in the room above,
a vocalisation of your drowned regret
passing between our separate environments.

So much of my translation
is what I want to hear. Why,
that gray morning, in the quiet kitchen
I imagined your footsteps thumping down the stairs
to embrace domesticity, purge
the freedom from your lungs: an ocean
on the hardwood to learn to skirt
not walk into and out of while making ice, dinner, love
as if it’s not wet, your stubborn tracks, salt outlines
of where you’re not – our world was not
a tidal pool, a brief caught environment
ours was a towering forest,
fresh water, no single axe or design
even if now the moon sucks stump teeth
if I fashion your voice from friction.

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Naturalization

We sneakered the path daily
between paused bulls
and the Norfolk-Southern

jerking, riprapped wheels balanced
on a shriek mussing our hair.
Joked ourselves hoarse

passing through the milkweed
to the culvert where impressed by
our poverty of experience

we crewed an imagined ship
stinking of boys
begging freedom from the sea.

Now at the wheel of return
I begin to say,
my eye catching on the grass

shivering above the culvert
as if with the persistence
of my longing then,

“This is where,”
but the green words
are dust without the accent

and there’s no way
that I will allow myself
the risk of that twang now.

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Two Snows

It snows once, weighting the trees
the way that mergansers
weight cold-black water
and during that snow
it’s dry beneath the cedars
so much so that you can lie
on the dead needles like a warm pallet
and watch the snow falling
until it doesn’t land on you

The second snow falls maybe a day
or a night later
and is a gentled snow
it falls heavy or soft
depending on the movement of the boughs
sifted fine it fills your collar
the seams of your jacket
shushing from the canopy
the small striking sound
of each grain lost
in the needles below.

Two snows
and the Mergansers
who never leave their feathers to be found
in icy mud like Mallards or Geese,
that float light as sucked eggs,
like the mineral remnant
of every shamed, juxtaposed thing,
will never experience the second
which is for me, foxes, coyotes, deer,
wrens even,
those of us not buoyant or fastidious
Drowners
given that gift in consolation.