Matt Salyer
Tweeting Aleppo
Look: confused, like a busted bee dismounting its wall
from the brood frame’s quarantine, its broken archive
a stick-smacked spill of production time, I want
you to picture a father in the black-and-white kill
zone of a hundred characters, your six legs in sand,
his serif of limbs, lines of the bombed blocks graphed
at different heights, the world as worn, and what
is a father then but part of the theory that drones can’t see
the color red on a best dress and dear-heart,
of the sun’s bloody head kicked by beasts of success.
Matt Salyer is an Assistant Professor at West Point. His work has appeared in Narrative, Hunger Mountain, Poetry Northwest, Beloit, Massachusetts Review, The Common, and numerous other journals. He was a 2017 semifinalist for the Brittingham and Pollak Prizes, and a finalist in 2016 and 2017 for the Iowa Review Prize. His first book, Ravage & Snare, is forthcoming from Pen and Anvil Press.
Return to November 2017 Edition
Look: confused, like a busted bee dismounting its wall
from the brood frame’s quarantine, its broken archive
a stick-smacked spill of production time, I want
you to picture a father in the black-and-white kill
zone of a hundred characters, your six legs in sand,
his serif of limbs, lines of the bombed blocks graphed
at different heights, the world as worn, and what
is a father then but part of the theory that drones can’t see
the color red on a best dress and dear-heart,
of the sun’s bloody head kicked by beasts of success.
Matt Salyer is an Assistant Professor at West Point. His work has appeared in Narrative, Hunger Mountain, Poetry Northwest, Beloit, Massachusetts Review, The Common, and numerous other journals. He was a 2017 semifinalist for the Brittingham and Pollak Prizes, and a finalist in 2016 and 2017 for the Iowa Review Prize. His first book, Ravage & Snare, is forthcoming from Pen and Anvil Press.
Return to November 2017 Edition