I published with > kill author because I was fortunate enough for them to have me. I’ve always admired their anonymous masthead and commitment to imagination, individuality, invention, and impactful writing. I miss their presence greatly and dedicate these pieces to them.
Begin with a simple ward like a prayer so beautiful it cannot be spoken aloud, or a corpse so small one could not heap enough dirt to ply her light. Sometimes you would pretend to be the weather station & treat me to a forecast, like expect a mudslide tonight in Toledo, tomorrow there will be snow in Tokyo. We swallowed ourselves in the homecoming parade when we knew home was lost, buried our grace in the sidewalks so only the footfalls might find us. Television sang us to sleep those nights our tongues failed to fetch us our words. Patio chimes tapped out our shame, the dogs yelped our fence had been left open. & your silent face is Mandela music. I’ve never seen anything as sinless as your pale thin wrists―file under Things I Should Have Told You When I Had You Here in the Passenger Seat. There is a cathedral on the far side of town we could spy its steeple from our house. Tomorrow while the children let out from school they’ll tear it down. But how the trees graft themselves to the lake, how the clouds hang from the moon like your memory swings from my chandelier: Remember this landscape, if nothing else, the way I still wrap my stain glass around your sunlight. This is where the ward ends, this is where you say goodbye. This is where you lean in close, pour your poison through my ears, whisper: Of the hundred billion types of light you were my favorite.
Progress is made in such ways as Sure & Cut Here & Bomb The Temples. We fed growth hormones to the angels for weeks then fed them glass to study the angles at which they fell from the sky. Froze the stars with radon gas to charge a surtax on light. In the barracks where we scientists slept the Great Radio would instruct us further. Under our pillows our protractors & holy polarimeters. Some terrorists rigged the particle collider to blow we relocated to the countryside, paid the farmers in data & slaughtered the sacred cows. Harpoons of spirit concentrate let loose in vaporous spurts, we siphoned the savage matter, refined it and pasteurized into a chemical cocktail, pumped it in through pneumatic tubes & increased our oral anatomies by 200%: elocutionary state of the art. That winter our tongues turned black, satellites began to topple from space. Beached on earth their frazzled husks hemorrhaged sparks. Helium rockets barely braved flight, skimming sky before lost in the atmosphere. All fuses refused. We returned to the sacred cows but the supply had been mercy-scalped, the ancients absconding to the west. Back in the barracks we found the tables had been lined with scalpels, the Great Radio told us the answer was inside us all along. Go ahead, it decreed, make your contribution―just leave your blood tithe at the door.
Matthew is author of Escapologies (Red Bird Chapbooks), Infinity’s Jukebox (Passenger Side Books), Book of If&Ever (Red Bird), and the forthcoming Ritual Hauntings (Patasola Press). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, PANK, Gargoyle, Hobart, NAP, and others. He is managing editor of Mixed Fruit, co-founder of Cloud Rodeo, and a reader for PANK, The Iowa Review, and NPR’s 3 minute fiction. He currently attends the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for fiction and keeps a list of his sins at Matthewburnsideisawriter.tumblr.com.
Matthew is author of Escapologies (Red Bird Chapbooks), Infinity’s Jukebox (Passenger Side Books), Book of If&Ever (Red Bird), and the forthcoming Ritual Hauntings (Patasola Press). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, PANK, Gargoyle, Hobart, NAP, and others. He is managing editor of Mixed Fruit, co-founder of Cloud Rodeo, and a reader for PANK, The Iowa Review, and NPR’s 3 minute fiction. He currently attends the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for fiction and keeps a list of his sins at Matthewburnsideisawriter.tumblr.com.