Richard L. Matta

Chemotherapy

With each infusion I imagine

I’m a birch tree nurtured

by nutrients traversing

through its roots in a grove.

We’re a community fending

off parasites and strangler figs.

They sense weakness—

those bark beetles, defoliators,

dwarf mistletoes. They’re

like street predators sensing

weakness and opportunity.

We share our collective

intelligence, communicate

warnings about food and

drink. But here the metaphor

collapses. It’s my DNA.

Not the initials I carved

on a tree so long ago. It’s

much bigger than that.

We split the atom,

devastated cities. Just take

a biopsy of Hiroshima trees.

The needle is extracted.

So many fallen leaves.

Bioluminescence

And so in a warm Florida lagoon

sparkling turquoise

as if an ancient Ais tribe

sprinkled magic

into the teeming dinoflagellates

you find yourself

treading and sidestroking,

nearly naked

after you stripped and unexpectedly

jumped from a boat

full of strangers. And as they scream

asking if you’re OK

you know, for just awhile, you looked

like an angel.

---

Richard L. Matta is originally from New York’s rustic Hudson Valley. His work appears in Glint, Slipstream, Healing Muse, and elsewhere. He currently resides in San Diego, California.

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Dom Blanco

Urbs in Horto – City in a Garden

Where I journey through alleys that run like rivers

of piss & trash & cigarette tar

Where I listen to police & ambulance sirens

reverberate through the city’s perfect grid system

& to a woman declare she is trans & that she

will skin the man that beat her

Where I watch the poor jab needles into their ankles

from tents on Lower Wacker Drive

Where I learn the wind doesn't reference nature

but the nature of politicians

& the color of your skin determines life expectancy

Where the musk of flesh is finely pressed

into CTA buses & ‘L’ trains

Where I wheel a man with no working feet

down 3 blocks on State Street

Where the City in a Garden that once burned

still does today.

Long Night in Chinatown

Profusely screaming . . .

why

I do not claim to know

I have arrived

at the corner of Cermak

when the man in distress

demands

What are you looking at!

What are you looking at!

demands

the man in distress

at the corner of Cermak

I have arrived

I do not claim to know

why

profusely screaming . . .

Cricket Hill

On this man-made hill, I am what is

hardly the gladdest thing

under the weakening sun.

I do not touch the more than

hundreds of small flowers

nor do I pick one. I look to the towers

& clouds, longing to see

past the horizon. And

when the light finally recedes

there, & the lights of the city

begin to show, I will start down,

to somewhere I call home . . .

---

Dom Blanco is a Cuban-American writer originally from Miami, FL, now based in Chicago, IL. He holds an MFA from Randolph College.

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Charis Morgan

From the Porch

The possum perches in the apple tree

past the moon’s rising. Three dogs circle,

their barks harsh, sudden ripples in the stillness.

Pest control recommends treating every possum

as if it is female, as if it is carrying young.

She hisses with a hundred needle teeth.

Arms crossed, I watch the standoff

in the two-tree orchard. The old dog

plants himself three paces back, wagging

his stub tail. His jaws have crushed bones

and turtle shells. Suburban wild and wary,

the possum resigns to an uncertain safety

in the crook of the limbs.

Chilled in oversized cotton short and shirt,

I admire her versatility – show teeth, play dead,

claw up a tree for plunder. From perpetuity,

rites of survival. How long will she crouch

in the tree, risking her spine over a few sour apples?

I envy the audacity of thieves

and their willingness to risk body and future

to gain, in some eyes, trivialities. I sit in a theater

with the man I love after months more apart

than together. How much will we risk over each other,

after stealing pieces we don’t intend to return.

I would not be afraid if I had not watched him

peal away so much of me.

I cannot recall how she descended,

whether she pocketed the apples or not.

The old dog would have liked to snap her neck

like the one before, when she must have broke

for the fence. The possum remembers her night

of pillaging far better than me, returning to sleep

in that loft alone.

Panzanella

I remember snapdragons coming up like spears

to my chest in my mother’s garden, color of a honeybee’s

stripe, marmalade, and fireworks. Their columns of wavy lips

closed, softly inviting to suck my little finger, to kiss

my nose if plucked. My mother gifted an armful of lilies

to her grandmother and regretted it. She warned me to look,

not touch. Today I am falling into the art of panzanella. Bread ends

toast in the oven, cold tomato skins give way to my knife

with a pull forward or back. A sign of dullness, my lover would say.

The long and hefty cucumber now dissected beneath my hand.

He liked to narrate with the senses as he cooked, timed by pops

and aroma, spent hours crafting a meal disappeared in minutes.

I tear fresh mozzarella apart and am left with a soft film of fat

on my fingertips. With my left hand, I strain ice water

from the red onions, shocked into a softer tang. I shred the basil

and recall a dozen gardens that grew like children, tended or neglected.

The refrigerator hums so loudly. I could not bear to live inside it

any longer than I did. For years, my instinct was to create distance,

to keep a knife between me and the object, to pull on gloves

before planting seeds too old to sprout. Today I have made myself

the sweetness of summer out of season, and I delight

at the heart of the tomato and flesh of the cucumber,

fresh and fragrant. I would give half my years

to live each moment like this, by mouth and hands.

---

Charis Morgan is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama and an assistant poetry editor at Black Warrior Review. Her work is forthcoming in the Florida Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere.

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