Matthew Gellman
So Much Light
The cracked blue leaf of cemetery
that used to make me falter.
Where else could my mind slow-hum
its hours of practiced evasion?
Childhood’s smell of tin-bright cold
and snow-dust coating the pepper of crows
that visit the branches of my walk home
through a present I will never be
unhooked from. I want my lips to split
the lit space between the words dance and don’t.
To know my mother before the mishap
of her early marriage, how she walked
to school each morning of her girlhood,
a rudiment, wringing ice from her hair,
her head turned down and silent
as a sacrifice to wind. So much light
coming off of the mirror and rivering
through the hush of the bathroom
where I stood in her lipstick, pilfered
jewelry, strange dominion of closed doors.
Some nights talking into the mirror,
waiting for it to talk back.
Mimicking her posture, even now,
each dawn a not-music I climb.
Matthew Gellman is the author of Night Logic, selected by Denise Duhamel as the winner of Tupelo Press's 2021 Snowbound Chapbook Award. His first full-length collection of poetry, Beforelight, was selected by Tina Chang as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from BOA Editions. A 2023–2024 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Matthew has also received awards and honors from Brooklyn Poets, the Adroit Journal's Djanikian Scholars Program, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Narrative, the Common, North American Review, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, the Nashville Review, Lambda Literary's Poetry Spotlight and other publications. Matthew holds an MFA from Columbia University and lives in New York, where he teaches at Hunter College and the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Return to September 2023 Edition
The cracked blue leaf of cemetery
that used to make me falter.
Where else could my mind slow-hum
its hours of practiced evasion?
Childhood’s smell of tin-bright cold
and snow-dust coating the pepper of crows
that visit the branches of my walk home
through a present I will never be
unhooked from. I want my lips to split
the lit space between the words dance and don’t.
To know my mother before the mishap
of her early marriage, how she walked
to school each morning of her girlhood,
a rudiment, wringing ice from her hair,
her head turned down and silent
as a sacrifice to wind. So much light
coming off of the mirror and rivering
through the hush of the bathroom
where I stood in her lipstick, pilfered
jewelry, strange dominion of closed doors.
Some nights talking into the mirror,
waiting for it to talk back.
Mimicking her posture, even now,
each dawn a not-music I climb.
Matthew Gellman is the author of Night Logic, selected by Denise Duhamel as the winner of Tupelo Press's 2021 Snowbound Chapbook Award. His first full-length collection of poetry, Beforelight, was selected by Tina Chang as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from BOA Editions. A 2023–2024 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Matthew has also received awards and honors from Brooklyn Poets, the Adroit Journal's Djanikian Scholars Program, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Narrative, the Common, North American Review, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, the Nashville Review, Lambda Literary's Poetry Spotlight and other publications. Matthew holds an MFA from Columbia University and lives in New York, where he teaches at Hunter College and the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Return to September 2023 Edition