When Things Falls Apart
We tell everyone that we’re okay, you and me. Then we
look out over the harbor and watch evening boats turn to
flowers on the lake. Their smokestacks become stamens.
Their sails unfurl like petals. How lovely, you say, and
climb a sugar maple to get a better view. How unnerving, I
reply, and dig my fingers into the dirt. A seagull pecks at
your purse. Hey! it cries. Hey! you cry back. I say
nothing—a sitting duck—so you drum your nose like a
woodpecker against the trunk. Hey! Blood trickles along
the contour of your lip. Hey! I dig my fingers deeper into
the soil. Hey! Your shoelace snags on a limb. Hey! I grab
a hibiscus by the roots and pull like an anchor already
weighed, a ship already sailed, a gull miles from any sea.
Ruffled Feathers
I saw two birds on a wire. Two muscular crows, all
shoulders, bulbous and purple beneath the moon. Skittish,
of course, the way birds are—anxiously perched there on
the wire, brooding over the uneasy possibility of brushing
tail feathers. Not accidentally, perhaps, yet still unsure how
the other would take it. They shift their talons, reassessing
the space between their bodies, riding that line between
socially appropriate and brazenly presumptive. Should I
test the waters? one thinks. Offer a wing tip? Pretend I
stumble haphazardly like a damsel—Oh, my! Silly me!—so
that my breast falls tactically to his beak. His move. Or
just go for it: my primaries to his flank. Dare I my
secondaries? Take him back to my nest and let him
uncover my coverts, explore my undertail, show him how
shrill I can caw.
On a Beach, Thinking of Ohio
Sea snails dot the shore like half-buried
treasure—interesting enough, sure, yet lacking the
mystery of it all. I dig one out with my fingers and hold
the conch shell at arm’s length. How different it is from
its relatives back in the Midwest—the sheer girth of the
thing, the ornate spirals and rococo trimming, its fleshy
body plunging wildly outward toward the sand, toward
the sea, toward any heaving thing that reminds it of
home.
Matthew Beach lives, teaches, writes, and paints in Canton, Ohio. His poems and stories appear in The Prose-Poem Project, Metazen, Weave, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere.