Skinner Matthews writes and lives in the Appalachian mountains of Maryland. His poetry celebrates his working-class upbringing and sheds light on the generational poverty, abuse, addiction, and violence that are landmines exploding every day in the streets, neighborhoods, and family households of the working-class and poverty-stricken. He has been published in Amethyst Review, As Surely as the Sun Journal, Autumn Sky Poetry, Dog Throat Journal, Ekstasis Magazine, Eunoia Review, Hilton Head Poetry Trail, Inside and Out Anthology – Mental Health Society of America – South Carolina, The Livina Press, Local Life Magazine, Loud Coffee Press, Rising Phoenix Review, Sea Change Anthology – The Island Writers Network, Stray Branch Literary Journal, Susurrus and Unlikely Stories.
Grief in Aubade
Black coffee,
a breakfast sandwich,
home fries with the skins still on,
salt and pepper
eases the taste of dirt
these spuds spend their lives in.
Let us call this home
early spring of ‘19.
My son’s been dead five years now
my brother, seven,
the clinic says my wife
has maybe a year left.
The air’s a pastel grey
over the cornfields of Maryland
The groundhog, doesn’t seem to care
digs deep at my arugula,
that perfect hole in my heart
no amount of drink seems to fill.
There is a story to this
that one day I will tell my grandkids,
but I don’t know it’s moral yet.
The cat’s busy doing her usual thing,
going mad in her attempts
to purr inside the melancholy.
The dog, without provocation,
[Maybe, jealous from lack of attention?]
leaves me with his tail between his legs.
He knows how long this day will be.
So, I get on with it. After the coffee is gone
I fold yet another prayer into my pocket,
to save it for that rainy day
when God reveals his plan to me,
and with a sigh I push back from the table,
find just enough to muster myself,
rise up, and give one more ounce
of whatever’s left to this day.
Uxorious Travels
My proof of God
is in pictures I have
framed on my walls.
Joyous hellos and
Betty Boop laughs
as she waded
through amorphous
amoebas of cancer.
Famines begging
with hands folded up,
pleading
to quiet the gravity
of the vertigo
and the grandness
on those Costa Brava cliffs
we’ve laid hands on
all our lives
and are now
too terrified to stop
telling these tales
of our useless splendor.
The moon,
how it rises
blue each night
over Manhattan and Paris,
Vernazza and Positano,
and further southward
on Grecian terraces
below the Acropolis,
seismic shifts
of magnetic resonance
in the ultrasound
I hoped was a dream
instead, was
apocalyptic art;
the crumbling columns
in the catacombs of her colon.
Her breasts, shriveling
into leather
as she held my hand
to her heart
and my fear is
that it will and won’t stop
and it rages on, nonetheless,
kisses me with all that’s left
of love and will’s
tenderness…her veins
hard as sycamore twigs,
the radiation blasted,
poisonous chemicals time
had folded into sharpened
rib seraphs, piercing hearts
and drawing blood through
the chords of lung collapses
on those illusions of love
until
I can clearly see
everywhere
the beauty is
in this poem
—slaves carrying
large, jerry cans
from pale, silver river
to semolina
and weeping goldenrod
in yet another miracle
of air and water
lost among the gods
devouring pillory
becoming rouge and rosewood.
So soft
to the touch
two areolas
almost apricot
rise above
two slivers of alabaster
moon
rugosa roses weltering
on the sun hammered anvil.
Hercules
my name not yet lost to the haze
of terminal fate
and Persephone
a goddess
and a god
shoot through my spine.
I am left
to wonder
for whom this visitation was—
her or I?
Nausea
After Jean Paul Sartre
There truly is no one present here
but this man from Rouen,
his wife, his children, interrogating
the absence of meaning. The lower case i,
swallowing and volunteering at the same time.
With our gratitude for neon, our lives
are never sweetened by our intentions,
our hunger remains whole. How long
have we killed for a living, without mercy,
and our will to survive, only to wake up
one morning wondering; is it a myth
that the meek will inherit the earth?
Knowing full well, we arrived barefoot
with that soft spot in our skull, but leave hardened,
a broken shell of what once we were.
Eaten alive by monsters we discovered
under our beds. In between, we attempted
to compose ourselves with the diction of
Walter Cronkite’ sentences, but we hear
only the dirges of our dithyrambs.
Our gods fermenting in a jar; the devil
wearing horn-rimmed glasses, sexual
identity crises and, while this love thins
in the petri dish of its experiment,
the widest of a grin. A derelict child
with a dagger and gangsta ways, awaits his prey;
madmen in love, lepers with three-legged dogs,
queers in the closet, pedophiles and sadists
without roman collars, unable to pray.
Nothing more truthful than a species
bathing in its feces. Truly, only God
can know this, really? We? We are lost
at some sort of art show, discovering
the difference between color and the light
that keeps changing it. Yet it does not matter,
they are the same thing, and amount too little
to change the rhythm in our threnody.
Like our self-medication is equivalent
to an attempt at self-euthanization,
we’ve had it coming for a while now, in
rehashed histories of borderline clashes;
mutinies after negligence at the helm.
It is what looms that we cannot escape.
Even if we are mistaken, have even
a thread of a chance, the weather is timeless
and unrelenting, we don’t know the viscosity
of water when we are drowning, or how
the limitless weight of this thing called gravity
shapes the contours of our amorphous hearts,
creates a reticence in the light that is
easier to collapse into neutrons,
the outer layers shedding until they are left
not one ounce of energy. The palmetto
bug makes it camp on our face, our mothers cry
from the water and the wine we call living.
Their wails no longer attempting prayer
in the basilica of our brokenness. Instead,
everything—comes up for air, squeezing
through the seams and cracks, giving testament,
the ellipsis is missing in this moment
because nothing is more meaningful to say.
Villefranche-sur-Mer
The sea ends here on the jetty
in the silt, sand and loam.
Waves—changing the leeward drift
from joy to grief or uncertainty—
break on the seawall, the village
full of us unimaginable beasts.
Two wives too late, sons and daughters
in discovery of their discontents,
lost in the calculus. No secrets
are hidden in Nowhere, Oklahoma,
Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, or the salt
we find in this sea water. Jesus
and Rimbaud, and you, and I,
the nativity of certain wonder
born each morning
in the mewing of these gulls.
An elegy of Marian Lee
For the many suffering domestic violence – Content warning – Sexual Violence
Now that she is allowed to speak
she says it was difficult to sing
while drowning, before he carved
this voice out of her mourning,
in the river immersed her, an aria
of alveoli filled, then collapsed
and convulsed upon each other
in those few vital moments
when one realizes other bodies
of tenderness are bobbing
elsewhere in the water
suffering the same hemorrhages,
swollen fingers from the sting
of the stonefish, grasping
the stark & sterile simplicity
of her breathlessness
and complicit silence; her
choking and gagging, his hand
on her neck by mid-afternoon,
and his cock forced gingerly
into her mouth by evening.
A litany of larcenies that can
never all be listed in the brief
but many moments they happen
all over the Americas…A hope
and a dream, a prayerful call
to a god who is unhearing,
lasting just long enough for him
to commit more violence. Love
with its throat slit, the aftermath
of estrangement in a world
of imagined treacheries;
of black-and-white, in vivid color
fantasies, positively framing
pantomime pornographic voices,
expressionless mannequins
speaking the same, similar language
predetermined by psychopaths
come for the movable feast
of laid open roadkill, and
the neighbor’s dogs. Perhaps
she should have known this
when he regarded as whorish
how her nipples rose a pained pink
when flushed, when she called
his name and he didn’t answer,
when she needed the river
Oedipus for soothing, spooned
in our dreams, our bodies warming
the billet in December. When she
needed rest we fell into each other’s
REM’s. No slobber or miasma
of armpits nor dead sweat of July
teenagers dripping from sternum
to sharp clavicle, her body unable
now to imagine who he was. Even
after bearing five boys in his name,
she hopes and she prays they don’t
have that graven image of love
that she had with him.
The Galway Review 