Early Morning in the Side-Yard
On the garden’s wall
thighs and fingers pressed together
pressed white— cold with dew
bits of mulch stick to our feet.
My mind goes back— around itself
Speech sits in my throat
force it to dormancy
turn out your eye
The old stars make way
A bird sings alone, in fits
The night turns blue.
She sees and she hears
lets it run over her
lustrous as a leaf in rain.
A worm falls out of the ground
pushes through the mulch
blindly feeling for softness.
The sky gives up its pattern,
grows the dew thicker.
Do not blink do not speak
She knows the light of day,
so undeniable and airy in the early.
Look above the fence
Look into or through the trees
It has introduced the choir.
That bird does not sing alone.
Could you speak? Could you,
when the face of Earth is set
in fresh, cold blue, even mutter?
The worm has found soft earth.
The birds only grow louder
It is over, night is over.
So she leads me
into the moist lawn.
We fall into broken dance
Lift her
her legs wrap around me
we fall beside the rose bush
into the mulchbed
Sitting in Bed, All Night, Just Home
Against the steady drone of AC,
a sharp heave— and my cough mixes
with the sterile vent current.
To go back to that red hammock
would be a dream, a dream
wrapped in thick Spanish talk
in more thick air, all informed
by a wandering ocean sigh.
Such a dream, but there’s the gong
of the dumpster. There’s the cicada cry
and the whine of floor beams
leaning together underfoot.
There’s my blinds all orange,
as they will be all night,
from the parking lot lights—
one of which is curtained by ivy
overgrown and filled with birds
who converse freely,
hours, still, before dawn.
My throat cottons.
As there is no cold dripping
can of beer sitting
on a stool just within swaying reach,
it stays that way.
Clouds in my forehead,
push my eyelids down, collapse
my midsection. May I, at last, slump
into my sheets? Settle, settle
my skin whispers through cotton.
Matt Conover currently studies creative writing as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia. His poems have appearred in Glass, Garden and The Last Romantics. He wrote this post, and thinks it’s fair to post his poems on the site he works for so that his readers can get a sense of where he’s coming from. He welcomes all criticism.
