WONDERLAND
POEMS
MATTHEW DICKMAN
Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks.
FOR JULIA, HAMZA, AND OWEN
IN MEMORY OF C. K. WILLIAMS
There are so many roots to the tree of anger
—AUDRE LORDE
It’s tough, kid, but it’s life
—DEAD KENNEDYS
I hate hate
—REAGAN YOUTH
Was that youth? that clear
sapphire on snow
—ADRIENNE RICH
CONTENTS
TEENAGE RIOT
TRANSUBSTANTIATION
THE ORDER OF THINGS
ONE A.M.
WHITE POWER
ASTRONAUT
WONDERLAND
TWO A.M.
STRAWBERRY MOON
LINOLEUM
A VERY GOOD DOG
THREE A.M.
DIRTY ROTTEN IMBECILES
ORCHARD
FOR IAN SULLIVAN UPON JOINING THE EASTSIDE WHITE PRIDE
FOUR A.M.
BAD BRAINS
WONDERLAND
EIGHT A.M.
SACK OF RABBITS
BAD LOVE
NINE A.M.
BLOOD MOON
LOST BOYS
NOON
WONDERLAND
MINOR THREAT
MINIMUM WAGE
THREE P.M.
SIDEWALK
FOUR P.M.
SAINT FRANCIS AND THE PINE TREE
FIVE P.M.
BLACK FLAG
WALKING THE DOGS
SIX P.M.
CIRCLE JERKS
WONDERLAND
EIGHT P.M.
GRASS MOON
BLACK LIPSTICK
WONDERLAND
MIDNIGHT
BIG LOVE
Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks.
WONDERLAND
TEENAGE RIOT
All of us were boys only some were taller or already in high school, and almost nothing else
mattered but to learn some new trick,
to pull off something we saw in a skate video, wind cutting
around our bodies when we flew
off the lip of a ramp, grabbed the board and twisted
into a 180, kicking
a leg out and landing it, the only way to run
through the neighborhood
was to run through it
together, flipping off cops and skinheads, I almost
don’t even remember girls but a vague sense of the taste of bubble gum
and how they smelled so different
from us, sitting in some kid’s basement drinking
his parents’ vodka, we grew out our bangs, moved in a pack,
jumped in when some one of us
got jumped,
so when a man we had never seen before
came up and started beating on Simon, one of us dropped his skateboard, walked
over to the man
like someone walking into a bank
and stabbed him.
The man, startled, sat down, right there on the asphalt,
right in the middle of his new consciousness,
kind of looking around.
TRANSUBSTANTIATION
My mother is taking
me to the store
because it’s hot out and I’m sick and want a Popsicle. All the other kids
are at school sitting
in rows of small desks, looking
out the window.
She is wearing one of those pantsuits
with shoulder pads
and carrying a purse with a checkbook. We are holding hands, standing in
front of the big automatic doors
which silently swing open
so we can
walk in together, so we can
step out of the heat and step
into a world of fluorescent light and cool, cool air.
Then, as if a part of the heat
had suddenly broken off,
had become its own power, a man
places his arm around her
shoulders but also around her neck
and she lets go of my hand and pushes me
away. Pushes me toward
the safety of the checkout line. Then the man begins to yell.
And then the man begins to cry.
The pyramid
of canned beans in front of me
is so perfect
I can’t imagine anyone needing beans
bad enough
to destroy it. The man is walking my mother
down one aisle and then another aisle
and then another
like a father dragging
his daughter toward a wedding he cannot find.
Everyone is
standing so still. All you can hear
is my mom pleading
and the sound of the air conditioner like Shhhhhhhhhh.
THE ORDER OF THINGS
Now when I think of the second grade I think about fall leaves,
black oaks, and urine.
I think about being caught in the bathroom, swinging
from the bar above the door to the whitewashed stall and how I was
dragged out by my arm
and how it felt like my arm was an avocado
someone had stabbed with a knife
to remove the pit,
and how I was
made to stand before each of my teachers and tell them
I couldn’t go to the bathroom by myself, Tell them
you don’t know
how—said God’s adult, the nun
who found me, who now leads me
to each classroom,
like following the Stations of the Cross.
And at each station—
the girl who’d been forced
to stand the whole day
over the spot where she peed
in the library, the kid who was made to wear a piece
of pink string
around his wrist,
a reminder
not to pee in his pants,
the boy who was marched through the mall, past the food court and arcade,
pushed along
by his father
who had made a sign,
made it from scratch, a sign
the boy was wearing around his neck, that read I wet the bed, and how
no one tried to stop it.
ONE A.M.
I went outside to see if I was there.
I went around the corner of the first time we met.
I went into your bedroom and found a little bit of night but just enough.
I went and got sick and now I don’t know what to do.
I went to school and was punished.
I went to school and sat in the coatroom and was on fire.
I went outside and the sky was a computer program with no father.
I went home early.
I went to the store and thought of Allen.
I went over my happiness to see if I could see you.
I went into the citrus coffee cups of your hands and stayed there.
I went to my mother and asked her to shut up.
I went to my mother and asked if she would hold me.
I went into a city I didn’t know and I was OK with it.
I went into a city I didn’t know and something like an accident killed me.
I went home after the car accident and you sat beside me.
I went over to your house and destroyed things.
I went but I didn’t know what I was doing.
I went behind the garbage can to be OK.
I went on vacation and lived like a boat for three days.
I went for it.
I went into the forest and all my friends were digging up their brains.
I went to sea and thought this is what I came for.
I went into the city of hammers and rang like a bell and rang like a bell.
WHITE POWER
They took an Ethiopian soccer player
and split his head open with a baseball bat. Trees
were standing around, cars were driving by.
My mother was making chipped beef and toast.
We never borrowed milk from the neighbors
though sometimes we had no money
for milk. My sister thought any man taller than me
was her father.
ASTRONAUT
What does it
what does it
what does it
feel like to walk in space, to walk on the moon, and then come back,
come home and cook your dinner inside a microwave oven?
Is it like when Michael was fourteen and walked into the Checkers Mart
on 92nd Avenue with a gun under his white T-shirt? His long legs
spacewalking between the aisles, all the different
colors of candy and car oil, moving through
the gravity like ice water. Is it like that? And what about
the cashier behind the counter? Standing there, Mission Control
watching him like coordinates on a screen, like you
would watch anything you thought you knew, but you don’t know,
you don’t know
you don’t know
you don’t know.
WONDERLAND
Caleb is standing in his front yard
hitting a stick
against a tree. In three months he will
be in the fifth grade.
He’s thinking
about He-Man and She-Ra,
about Castle Grayskull.
Inside the house
his dad is screaming at his mom.
Now Caleb’s throwing the stick
in the air
and imagining it’s a sword on fire
that only he can catch.
When his dad leaves
Caleb will go into the house
and find his mom in the weird dark
of his parents’ bedroom
where he will kiss her busted lip, crawl
onto the bed and hold her,
his arms just beneath
her ribs. Eventually
he will go back
out into the yard,
pick up the once flaming sword, and wait.
TWO A.M.
I lost my body in the fight for my body.
I lost my brother because his body hated him so much.
I lost time.
I lost the way and was happy and the moon was above me.
I lost the feeling in my fingers.
I lost some friends but found a secret room in my apartment.
I lost the chandelier light behind your shoulder blade.
I lost 1975.
I lost the hat you gave me and have never been the same.
I lost the polar bears and I lost the tigers and I lost the elephants.
I lost the ship at sea.
I lost the bottle.
I lost the rib that God gave and the rib that God took away.
I lost the sheet you had cut the two holes in for my eyes to see through.
I lost all my money.
I lost nothing that might have kept me alive.
I lost the light in the puddle with my face in it and a stick.
I lost the way to be with you.
I lost the wind coming through my window and the bed below it.
I lost blood.
I lost blood and stars and the fifth grade.
I lost paint-by-numbers and the color yellow and blue make.
I lost all my fillings.
I lost a fight in which I paid cash to fall and not get up and never get up.
STRAWBERRY MOON
It felt like the whole world
exhaled really fast like being
punched in the stomach.
Every song was about you.
I’m not kidding. Just
like in really bad songs and now
I can’t listen to anything
because I’m like a fuzzy bumblebee
bouncing off all these stamens,
flicking them with my wet
chin and pretending
it’s your stomach, honey, honey,
it feels like I’m never going
to be OK and summer
is coming no matter what.
Summer looks at me,
shakes its head
and says fuck you,
you should have prepared
for this, you should have been
a father but now you’re like
a can of dog food and only
the dogs are excited
but you and I know that’s only
because they don’t know better,
that’s only because they’re pets
and have been beaten
with the daily paper they are
trained to bring inside
and lay at the big hairless feet
of their masters. Lay. Lie.
I only ever wanted you to tell me
to sit. And now more than ever
I’m going to die, and that’s on me
I know, I know that’s my deal,
that’s my fault, that’s what
they say, and they should.
I keep praying it’s only summer
talking, that it’s only the dogs
barking, I keep looking at houses
we could live in like someone
shot in the head and asking
the people screaming
around him if he has something
on his face, he just can’t figure
it out, dumb beast, gone but not
really even knowing he’s gone.
LINOLEUM
Ryan had pictures of his mom
he would show
his friends, all of us
lost in the maze of sixth grade, reaching up
into the air of girls, and his mom
in a cheetah bra, laid back on the plastic
covering of the couch, her arms
folded across her body,
her hands
covering her crotch, her mouth
in a smile
and her eyes, I suppose, looking
into the eyes
of a man she had met and liked, a man
she had taken home, or a friend had
taken it for her, or she made her son take the pictures.
Ryan had a small stack of them
which he kept in a sock with yellow stripes on it.
My favorite picture of Ryan’s mother
was the one where she is kneeling down in the kitchen,
naked but covered by her long
hair, her knees
pressed into the linoleum, the same floor
where she would stand
in the morning,
mix her vodka with orange juice, a new day
appearing in the street like a van
with its windows
painted black. She was so beautiful
and sweet to us. I remember
she laughed a lot.
You and I both know what Ryan did
with the pictures when he was alone,
and it wasn’t anything short of dying.
He had found something
he could hold
in his hand like an alchemist,
a way of turning his shame from base metal into gold.
A VERY GOOD DOG
I must have looked so handsome because she said you look so handsome
and I must have b
een eight years old
because she said I can’t believe you are already
eight years old
and it must have been
a dark and romantic Italian restaurant
because it was dark in there and full of men and women holding hands
across the beautiful tables feeding each other
pasta and bread
and drinking wine and kissing and my mother with her Black Russian and me
with my Shirley Temple
and before we even sat down in the candlelight we must have
sat in the car because we were sitting in the car
in the pocket of the driveway where she placed her hand on my knee
and patted it like you would if the knee was
a very good dog
and she must have smiled and said are you excited for our date
because she smiled and said are you excited for our date
and then combed my hair
because my hair must have
needed to be combed, to be made right.
And we must have danced that night
because the restaurant had a dance floor full of other couples and she showed me
where my hands were supposed to go
and how to move my legs
and laughed
and beamed and said I love you so much
which meant there would be no other world
but this world,
no other way, no
other forest
but this forest and all the trees on fire and all the animals running.
THREE A.M.
The light invented who I was supposed to be.
Wonderland Page 1
