Whose Bits Are These?
Light under cloud skirts
I’m a big beautiful building
I’m enthusiastically washing your flower vase
I’m less enthusiastically picking glass out of your disposal
The sun selects today
To be one of the days
I am defeated by everything
I have his paint brush
He left a little glow on
Like an admiral
I’m relieved
I’m still young if I say so
A sword or a wing
Depending on the war
The urban planners give us one window
This isn’t Europe, bucko
It doesn’t have to be hard
The sky over the hardware store
An axolotl’s gills
Signalling the only signal
On the kitchen counter
Your tomatoes say hello!
Logistics
If my heart flutters, if
my heart grows
too big to fit
its container on
the container ship,
how will I convey it
to you? Dulled coworkers
drink corporate fizz
hauled from this or that
port of bright days.
Air traffic control says
I’m supposed to share
my shell they keep stealing,
what they call understanding.
If I peak out from under the sand
on speech’s beach,
they would try to crush me
with understanding. Federal
regulations prohibit scampering
expressively across the runway,
the tower, the cockpit, the clouds.
The shadow plane
points perilously
in the direction of
human love.
From up here
it looks harmless enough.
Monoculture
All words come out of the factory.
Left indeterminate, I gloss
the cash crop growing tidily in its rows
on an unnamed island
as: when the crabs have names, the lights flicker;
as: this is a threat;
as: the difference between individual and collective
mythology depends on the coconut.
Like my vivid dream
no one else finds interesting.
In my kiosk my ice cream ticks
its flavor of time cooly.
The pool is closed another day in Belgium.
Something pleasurable imagining the surface of water,
a grid whose lines give way to ripples
bunching or fleeing at coordinates’ edges
on days I could pass through the turnstile
hearing the satisfying metal click as
the click of my life falling into place,
scanning the sunburnt teenagers,
scanning the diving board, the pool chairs,
the sun—a large orange—
I obliquely register
on its sticker the name of an island
I have never been to
famed for happiness.
The happiness of the orange is not a delusion.
That’ll be $5.16 after tax.
Matt Broaddus
Matt Broaddus is the author of Deeper the Tropics (BUNNY, 2024) and Temporal Anomalies (Ricochet Editions, 2023). His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Annulet, and The Paris Review. He lives in Colorado and works at a public library.