Photography © Chad Parenteau

 

Three Holes in the Saint’s Bathroom Window

1.          In what ways are you “broken?”

Like an old seat belt.
Like your molar.
Like a crow’s laugh by a frozen well.
Like a fat child with a viola.
Like a murdered architect.
Like a sack of teeth.
Like a mirror that shows someone else.
Like the Law.
Like the West.
Like the wind in a tree hung with dangling spoons.
Like a shaving brush.
Like Spain.
Like the jury system.
Like old rope.
Like smoke from my nose.
Like an abandoned fire engine.
Like a pond of shattered April ice.
Like Dumbo’s leg.
Like silence and like laughter.
Like thirst.
Like this.

 

2.          The poet is unsimilar to

The poet is like the (not an albatross) face on the
person in the back row (but not the face, the air in front of the face) at
the auction of ignorance (but not the auction, rather, a funeral
next to the auction – there’s a dead man and there are waxy
things hung on the walls and I think a straw-decked yokel is
selling string beans) and the auctioneer’s not selling
ignorance itself but rather the whiff of satisfaction that comes
with good old-fashioned idiocy, and over the scene a fat
blowfly (he’s just licked the dead man) whirrs in and
out, over the auctioneer’s bald spot, angers the yokel, alights
on the stringbeans, avoids the waxy things that are sticky
in the heat, and finally traverses the air in front of the
face, and as the face’s attention wanders, that’s what the
poet is like. Laughing, sometimes you
burst into tears – are you surprised?

 

3.          Note Taped to a Two-Way Mirror

Night with its slippery fingers
The clock with its broken face
The bang on your window at midnight
Rough boots in sacred space
Sirens that split the evening
Explosions that tremble your walls
The shrieks and the trampling of bodies
The echo of footsteps in halls
The panicked, hysterical coverage
The image that won’t go away
Supplies laid up in your cellar
A hellish rose blooms by the day
Cries for rescue, so feeble
Our hearts with compassion: too full!
The tramping of boots on pavement
The smashing of windows and skulls
Leaflets, demands and petitions
Marches and calls for revolt
A refuge, for hiding from murder
A dream of a pleasant result
So we stand on the edge of the darkness
We say it could always be worse
We repeat as the new night is falling
We cite it by chapter and verse
Hole up and hide in your basement
Say “I remember when…”
Dwell on the past for your comfort
It won’t ever come round again.
***
Walk with Death in the desert
Lie in the valley of bones
Pray to a sky that’s on fire
See a crowd standing, each one alone
The snakes blow like ash round the canyons
The fire’s tail scorches the land
There’s a ladder that climbs up to Heaven
But you were born without hands
This note was hastily written
When the sun still shone in the sky
It was made for the children of darkness
Who dream that their ancestors lied.

 

Matthew F. Amati’s fiction has been published in several places, and he’s published some poems. He also plays the 5-string banjo and used to work for Jerry Springer.

Chad Parenteau is Associate Editor of Oddball Magazine.