Tuesday poem #218 : Matthew Henriksen : Room

I’ve loved a few people whose human figures convinced me one body
could hold another body in mid air while both bodies fell

a few people whose words held my face

a dish their hands would shatter on the floor if they
stopped talking for one instant

a few people whose eyes bored through me as time
burns a hole in the boarded up house of my mouth

as if the sun cares enough to ruin anything

It’s only humans who make a condition of shaking babies to death

who turn their love letters into funeral rafts and burn
the human condition out of any lover they once sang after
in the empty rooms where they sleep

Matt Henriksen grew up in Wisconsin, where he attended Lakeland College and received a B.A. in Writing before receiving an MFA in Poetry at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of two books of poetry, The Absence of Knowing and Ordinary Sun, and his poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Rumpus, the Arkansas Times, and in scores of other journals and anthologies. He has co-edited the online poetry journal Typo for over a decade and currently is a Teaching Poet and President of the Board of Directors for the Prison Story Project. His main project is raising his precocious and gorgeous seven-year-old daughter, Adele Cecilia.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan