Arsenic Lobster poetry journal
Issue Twenty-one
Winter 2009
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Silent, Upon a Peak
Matt Gillespie

When I am awake,
it is the picture of us
over my desk,
that keeps me there,
that soaks the room
in cold, clear illumination.

Look down and judge me,
run me through
with dense, desolate memories.
My mom, Polish orphan -
sadness must feel self-indulgent.
My dad, fourth kid of seven -
Grand-dad would have been on his third gin
by this time on a Sunday morning.

Three of us
at the Hotel Bel Air -
two million miles
due west of Illinois.

This is Father’s Day, 2005:
the last Father’s Day
in the history of the world.

The day that life placed you,
for once,
on the telling end of the joke.

Let us eat our eggs in peace
amongst the dripping wet playboys
and pajama-clad debutantes.

In twenty days, you will be dead
and the Church will consign you
to a most holy limestone filing cabinet
that rises a thirty nine feet
over the granite gravestones
of your elders.

It’s your eyes,
the ones that filled with glass
that Sunday,
when I learned
that to perform CPR,
you break every rib in the human body;
that you have to burn the village
to try and save the kingdom –

It’s the eyes now,
that I see,
only the glass is gone.

How do you still teach me
when you’re dead?
Your bones are dust,
your words are air.
This is the memory
that holds me awake
with the foamy white gleam
and cold azure sting
of saltwater.

The name you gave to me
is Matthew John Gillespie.
I’m 22 now.
My pale Illinois feet are naked
as they curl into the bright white sands
outside Santa Cruz.
You didn’t see the Pacific
‘til you were fifty-one years old.

About Matt Gillespie

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