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 catacomb’s 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.