Arsenic Lobster poetry journal
Issue Twenty-one
Winter 2009
| Home | Current Issue | Contributors | Review | 2009 Pushcart Nominees | Order | Archive | Submission | About Us | Contact Us |
 
Gary, Indiana
Matt Gillespie

Iron bled to puddles,
beams sublimed to fumes;
Smelted metal,
exploded ore;

Grey specter
near a propane lake.
Rusted and oxidized.
The gale-force winds of progress

Out here, even the Indians
lived in pre-fab titanium teepees, so
welcome to the steel plant
that tipped over the edge
of the wide, flat world.

This mediocre metropolis,
rising in moderate splendor
above the great flat parking lot of the West.

And now, your body,
abandoned beneath a roto-tiller
that pulls open the fields
outside Muncie,
aerated clumps of dirt
spewed out and forgotten
beneath wheat shafts that reach up towards the sun.

Don’t you remember
when the snow fell outside me,
caked thick over streetlamps,
and made them stars
set warm and blue
against the purple February sky?

About Matt Gillespie

| Home | Current Issue | Contributors | Review | 2009 Pushcart Nominees | Order | Archive | Submission | About Us | Contact Us |