8.04 / April 2013

Four Poems

City of Motels

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_4/Mcbride1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

In the neighboring room
is a reel to reel, looping
a recording from some SoHo party
circa 1968.

Jaundiced Polaroids drift like leaves
through thick-carpeted hallways—

everywhere, these
people-echoes.

After it all
what isn’t memory?

At midnight
a desk clerk calls, saying
“‘You’ stands for
‘I want myself back.’”

The ice machine
mumbles its slurred Latin

and tonight
I am the littlest prison.

I remember your hair smelled like milk.

I remember when it snowed
it snowed only on your face.


City of Motels

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_4/Mcbride2.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

On a taupe chair
with no discernable edges

you watch clouds
clot into bruises

contemplate a 1992 lost
to rewinding VHS tapes.

All you ever wanted
was a box
big enough to hide in.

The soap is tiny
and shaped
like various waterfowl;

the telephone ringing
in the other room
will be your only remainder.


Cities of the Plain

Most every surface is pasted over
with curling wallpaper
sutured awkwardly by Scotch tape.

Each year, we tear a sheet
from the Yellow Pages
and whoever’s name’s longest
is president.

Our trees are made mostly
from Styrofoam
and wind whittles them
to pellets in days.


Cities of the Plain

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_4/Mcbride3.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

Skeletons of birds
hang still in the sky.

The clouds have gone all moldy.

Someone forgot to change
the bulb in the moon

so it makes a clicking noise
that keeps you from sleep.

You speak your name
into a sheet of cellophane

and hold the ball of it
in the palm of the palm of your hand.


Matt McBride published poems in or has poems forthcoming from: Diagram, Columbia Poetry Review, Cream City Review, FENCE, Mississippi Review, and Smartish Pace amongst others. Last February, H_NGM_N books released his chapbook, Cities Lit by the Light Caught in Photographs. He is an assistant poetry editor for Memorious.org.
8.04 / April 2013

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