Four Poems by Bradon Matthews

Real Job

With such winds counting their avenues against modernity
it appears I’ll have to return to the itchy sweater of
employment, pour the drink that is aside from language
liquor and a bit of juice and swallow
it before submitting with my animal paws
scratching hard against the pavement, begging
running moods to subsume cities, a werewolf
in a top hat with a tree growing out of it,
                             oh what have I come to,
              that at the end of this decade
              of living I’ve lost my ability to subsist on nothing but sun
              and thought? And the fear of it
              grips me like a jar of shaken
              eggs, all broken and yolk, even the yellow does not please me
              and the dripping’s just begun

Lately thinking sleep is half of life

depresses me but then
I think of three doves circling you
which is almost like
light breaking through a stained
glass window night a child’s blanket
pulled over the earth’s head
resting maybe only pretending
to rest but regardless
there’s The Red Pears and the black
manhattans there’s the love notes and the car
alarms the crosswalks and the spaciousness
of budding dogwood all of which
we drink from with our joint elucidating
natures and all of it returning now
trickling in under the false pretense
of a shut eyelid
when I half wake and hear you talking
in your sleep I talk back
like the words are bursting into the garden
of your subconscious
heart and the shadow of the dictionary
looming over the blooms conjures all the ways
communication fails
to capture the warm ornament
you’ve hung over my life
because there is no word for it
because it is my life itself

The difficulty

in wanting to remember every detail I grasp
only a useless phenomenological fog,
better instead to choose
three small details, which?
I’d like to note the large black and white photo
of two faces kissing, split in half so it repeats
once like a film strip, zoomed in so the pale cheeks
are nearly half the image, and the horizontal lips connect
in abstract palpability,
next the scent of amaro and applewood
smoke, the drink in my hand in the elaborate crystal
lowball, the texture of the etched pattern pressed against my fingertips,
and the buzz it gave me strong,
finally, the flame, the real flame
of the candle in the low low lights of five twenty-seven amid Philadelphia
winter, the sun ducking out early as a churchgoer, leaving
only this residual incendiary to dance in your eyes, green,
so green, even in the evening I could see them

Shrunk

Hat’s too tight
For my flowery
Head

This wooden earth
I pace

A door I’m not through
Closing

The hinge

The moonlit vase

Of broken
Snow

No mantle
For this fire



Bradon Matthews (he/him) is a Philadelphia-based poet and chronic human being. In his free time he enjoys collecting unanswerable questions and looking for in-network therapists. His work has previously appeared in One Art, HAD, Eclectica, Soundings East, TERSE., and elsewhere. You can find him on Instagram @bradonmatthews.