This pair of running shoes.
This afternoon.
This car that I’m driving made out of blood and guts and coupons.
This place like any other place.
CIRCLE JERKS
The starlings move
in one body made of many like the neighborhood, like
a hive gone mad. They move
like blood inside the hands of Holy Rollers, Christ-static
smothering
the church air.
A bunch of seeds in the air with wings.
A kind of all-or-nothing
silence
when they go to sleep in the chimneys. The baby starlings
underneath the mom and dad starlings.
Walking around here
I remember there was more than just what I remember,
more than garbage. There were animals in the sky
that moved like science fiction,
there were trees,
plants. There were dogs and cats
and a friend shooting up in your parents’ bathroom
like a starling, suddenly, into the air and then gone again.
WONDERLAND
Caleb is doing it himself.
I have to do this myself,
he said. So I steal some beer from my mom
and he brings a sewing needle,
a towel, some ink. He’s sitting
on his skateboard, dipping the needle
into the ink and then into his own skin,
over and over,
like an old lady working
on a country scene with thread.
This went on for a long time.
Then the thing began
to take shape, the lines became visible,
and soon it was all coming
together, the head first
and then the body of
the swastika
and finally it was whole and in the world.
Caleb’s face flush
and sweaty and excited.
When he asked how it looked
I said it looked
good. I couldn’t stop
looking at it
but when I looked up at him
it was like his face wasn’t there.
EIGHT P.M.
I could blow my brains out and then I’d really get it.
I could walk all over this place and never remember who I am.
I could taxidermy and lunges.
I could lungs and blood vessels and cartilage and lift with my knees.
I could walk away.
I could hello everyone I’m so glad you’re still here.
I could do lost keys and lost credit card and lost sock and also September.
I could in any room in your house.
I could light the light.
I could make it rain the way I am with you and also the freeway at night.
I could be here forever.
I could do the dying and let you do the funeral stuff, the sad stuff and all.
I could toy trains and mothballs and skeletons.
I could suck my thumb.
I could suck my thumb if you wanted me to.
I could do dusk and what is left moving around the leaves in the maples.
I could decide against it all and also my testicles.
I could run to the store and milk and baby please come back to bed.
I could beg the way I was taught to I am so good at it.
I could video games and hours of television and rosemary and cocaine.
I could make soup.
I could make tea and make it all up and also are you coming or going.
I could if I wanted to.
I could have been someone who lived.
GRASS MOON
My whole body is warm and sticky
like a child’s car seat
just waiting, just waiting,
in the dark
the blue heron that lives
in Laurelhurst Park is breathing
and there is a wind
that is coming all over the flowers
and all the ferns. I’m on my way
to myself, that’s what I’m told, that’s what
all the people who want me
to be alive keep saying,
they keep standing on the beach
wearing old-fashioned swim trunks
with a bullhorn telling me about it,
and you are home in your bed
like a soft animal with really intense
feelers and a kind of knowledge
some people have to go out
into the desert to get,
some people have to take drugs for that
and walk barefoot over coals
and pretend that nature is a mother
always wringing her hands
over her lost children.
I’m making a museum for myself
out of pictures of people
I used to know and hold and their brains
are like carnations floating in milk
when I think of them I think
what do I really want
out of this branch I picked up off the street
which does not belong to me at all.
Last night I asked the ceiling
what was going to happen,
and it said this is what
is going to happen: you will have to
stay in your body for much longer
than you really want to,
and I thought about how nice it felt
the first time I shaved my head
and walked out into the rain
and how the rain walked
all over my head
and how when I hear someone yelling
something at someone else,
when I hear someone throwing
something across a room,
I want the world to be my laundry—
quiet and good and neatly folded away.
BLACK LIPSTICK
My little sister is sneaking her friends out the back door of a bar
because the men in there won’t stop touching them
and the people in the bar
won’t stop the men and the men keep ordering sweet
drinks they think the women will like but they don’t want them.
All they want to do is leave and live.
When I get out of the shower and look in the mirror I say to myself
you should go to the gym, you should lose weight, be more
handsome. People who rape
other people have bodies like mine, people who hate their wives
and daughters. They hate them and go to the bar
and drink too much and touch people who do not want to be touched.
I don’t know.
I miss being young and going out in eyeliner and skirts. I miss
wearing black lipstick. Fucking boys
and girls was the best. It felt like drinking iced Americanos
on the roof of the roof of the world. From there you were safe, you could
smoke clove cigarettes with your friends.
You could throw rocks at the men down below, walking down the street
with their brains in one hand and their hearts in another,
a parade of terrible potential, while their mothers stand along the sidewalk
clapping and cheering, waving
baby-blue handkerchiefs in the cold air.
WONDERLAND
Caleb is marching
with his new friends, their shaved heads
like tongues of fire,
up 82nd Avenue, the cars honking at them
like they were vets
just home from the war. He must feel
so safe in his skin.
He must feel like he belongs.
With each step, each time
he raises his arm in the air
at that angle we all know,
a part of him
transforms, a part of him
fades and in its place is something more
vulnerable than a worm.
He is swinging
a metal pipe in a hand
that looks like an insect’s pincer,
his face looks like a piece
of fruit covered in flies.
Every time he takes a step
his childhood evaporates,
branches begin to crawl
out of his head, rise up like antlers.
MIDNIGHT
Now everything is going to be antidepressants and roses.
Now I get to go home for real.
Now the light in the bathroom is flickering.
Now my brain is jump ropes and licorice and also tubes.
Now my mother is calling.
Now my father is coming home.
Now fluorescent lights and the unbuttoning inside the MRI.
Now don’t look at me.
Now let’s just all calm down and what exactly happened here.
Now tissue paper and magazines.
Now I can just hide in bed and carve our initials into the bark.
Now moonlight and lip balm.
Now say whatever it is you were going to say.
Now settlements and rocket launchers and also I have champagne.
Now I can be the air I have always wanted to be.
Now you won’t be bothered.
Now the doors and the windows and the fuzzy-peach streetlight.
Now don’t touch me.
Now don’t worry there’s enough here for everyone I promise.
Now parades and confetti and sugar-covered almonds.
Now the extraterrestrial abandonment of the self.
Now razors and bathtubs and fifty milligrams of Valium.
Now this is happening of course it is.
Now this is not what I expected I’m sorry it will only take a minute.
BIG LOVE
All weekend my friend Jacob has been trying to land a 360 No Comply, he spends
hours skating at the mall and in Chinatown where he’s been experimenting with
pills he crushes up
and then inhales.
High school
is out there
somewhere
waiting for us.
All weekend he has been talking me out of my sadness. You have to disappear into it.
At Jacob’s house we pick up two cans of generic root beer and tighten the trucks on
his board.
His mother is
sitting on a
stool in the middle
of the living room,
half naked,
half covered in a robe. It’s summer and the can of root beer feels like a lake
in my hand. As we walk toward the front door Jacob’s mom is laughing. What
are you two faggots
doing anyway,
she says, you
guys gonna
fuck each other?
And then
there’s a weird silence and then Jacob punches her in the face, off the stool
and onto the floor. This is the mother and son disappearing. Like an old
television screen,
all static,
then dark,
then who
knows what
after that.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems have appeared in earlier drafts:
American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Boston Review, Hunger Mountain, The New Yorker, The Well Review (Ireland), and Zyzzyva.
All the “hour” poems first appeared as a chapbook titled 24 Hours. This chapbook was first printed in Paris, France, in 2014, by Onestar Press and then in the United States later that same year by Poor Claudia.
Both “White Power” and “For Ian Sullivan Upon Joining the Eastside White Pride” first appeared in a chapbook titled Something About a Black Scarf published by Azul Editions in 2008.
I am also grateful for the sustaining support of both the Guggenheim and Civitella Ranieri Foundations, without which a lot of these poems wouldn’t have been written.
I am honored to have had the support of amazing friends including Carl Adamshick, Kazim Ali, Elizabeth Austin, Samiya Bashir, Sean Aaron Bowers, Ernie Casciato, Trinie Dalton, Jason Dodge, Carolyn Forché, Jessica Grindell, Major Jackson, Thomas Lauderdale, Dorianne Laux, Matthew Lippman, Michael McGriff, Joseph Millar, Jay Nebel, D. A. Powell, Geoff Rickly, Christine Roland, Mary Ruefle, Ed Skoog, Mark Waldron, Ahren Warner, C. K. Williams, Kevin Young, The Greater Trumps.
Thanks to the wonderful Bill Clegg.
Deep gratitude is owed to Jill Bialosky for her continued faith, insight, and care.
Thank you to Drew Elizabeth Weitman for her patience and guidance.
This book would not be what it is without the suggestions and big vision of my brother Michael Dickman.
It would have been impossible to have completed this book without the love, help, critical eye, and life shared with Julia Tillinghast.
Love and honor to my little sister Elizabeth Dickman.
Thanks to all the different formations of my family: from the Dickmans to Tillinghasts to Vanhandles to Huddlestons to Castelluccis to Nobles.
And with special praise to my mother, Wendy Dickman.
ALSO BY MATTHEW DICKMAN
All-American Poem
50 American Plays
(with Michael Dickman)
Mayakovsky’s Revolver
Wish You Were Here
24 Hours
Brother
(with Michael Dickman)
Copyright © 2018 by Matthew Dickman
All rights reserved
First Edition
The lines from “Terza Rima”. Copyright © 2016 by the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright © 2001 by Adrienne Rich, from Collected Poems: 1950–2012 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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Jacket art and hand lettering: Casey Robertson / Robertson Design
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Dickman, Matthew, author.
Title: Wonderland : poems / Matthew Dickman.
Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, 2018
Identifiers: LCCN 2017052697 | ISBN 9780393634068 (hardcover)
Classification: LCC PS3604.I2988 A6 2018 | DDC 811/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017052697
ISBN 978-0-393-63407-5 (e-book)
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