coconut hands
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Float away to Zanj, shell opening.
Not treasure. Not to possess. I have had enough of your ducats. Extractions. My head full of teeth. Jangling pockets plummet sailors to the deep. Colonized by mollusks, the abyssal trench. To Zanj, which is temporal, requiring skills. Geomancers. Years carved as ivory memories. Elephants erect their palaces. Where I’m from we don’t even elect our kings. Where I’m from I don’t know anymore which god is possessing me. My spotty history, bent antenna. Suffering from enthusiasm, my eyes — ports — take in rolling blue dunes, and hidden among them gold humps where exists water, exists flesh. |
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pamphlet of lightning
Submerged wreck. Coral suited.
Polyps plop plop for a hand
to touch, to cut,
and liquefy. Coworkers
offer mysterious hugs
when I say I’m leaving. I’m leaving
the surface, scooped into sky.
Amalgamated. Shell shed, shell
scooped rough from sand. Unseen
adornment for sky. Skull shed
left wide open. Boogieing on
wind, brain circulates. Spirals.
Demanding a body. To be iridescent.
A shell. Arcing.
Polyps plop plop for a hand
to touch, to cut,
and liquefy. Coworkers
offer mysterious hugs
when I say I’m leaving. I’m leaving
the surface, scooped into sky.
Amalgamated. Shell shed, shell
scooped rough from sand. Unseen
adornment for sky. Skull shed
left wide open. Boogieing on
wind, brain circulates. Spirals.
Demanding a body. To be iridescent.
A shell. Arcing.
Matt Broaddus is a Cave Canem fellow and author of a chapbook, Space Station (Letter [r] Press, 2018). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, NightBlock, The Offing, and Heavy Feather Review. He is the recipient of a 2018 Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellowship and a 2018 Artist Residency from the Millay Colony for the Arts. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.