Claire Matway

Small Hands

light comes kissing the tops of heads, soft like

the skin of your eyelids and

a silhouette is a war

between window and shadow and

a line between dawn and coffee

and a bridge from

I know I am holding out to you things you do not understand

to

The only lie I’ve ever told you is that I will never die

and light is a war between skin

and memory and I

am a war between you and the

world

 

Lung Problems

        The trees are blue because the moon never really left them. I run through them as if they are ghosts, as if the air moving through me is theirs which I should not be taking, as if the work I am doing to propel myself up hills should instead be done to make myself transparent like steam, to go home more quietly.

        These days my father lets me drive when we go to my grandparents’ house. My mother sits alert in the back, the blue rims of her sunglasses glinting against the afternoon glare while steam rises from the smokestacks of distant steel mills. My father, too, is a runner; he comes home from work and changes into shorts and practices pushing air out of his way so that when he gets old, he will be better at it than his father is.

        My grandfather’s office is rich with air; long tubes go trailing from an oxygen machine into the living room, where my grandmother works on crossword puzzles with the same mind that sometimes forgets the difference between the blue pill and the white pill and runs from Monday morning to Monday night in a blur of boiling water and prescriptions and water and appointments and the sound of breathing and the sound of breathing and the smell of steam.

carpenter

coins shiver in cold water

trembling while wishes sink, heavy like

a mother pregnant with flowers

and dreaming of the old scent of the sharp fear of being lost;

in the morning, she places cross-sections of oranges upon cross-sections of pears

because she has spent all night hammering stars into the sky

and now her world is spinning pinwheels over

churning water so that nothing is

real except the

almost imperceptible sound of

steam rising,

condensation rolling down windowpanes,

dew evaporating into air.