Eyelashes by Matthew Milia

All of your debts
That blow to me like harmonizing trumpets
Then fall so ugly on all of me
How much harm will the harmonizing be?
As you take away from me
All of my nets
Where all your silverfish
Used to come right in
I wish you'd let them come again
Not bellied up or smelling of the sin
That you're proudly musking of with
All your regrets

June again
The milk times ten
For I have two new mothers
Giving birth to all the men
My brothers who will molt to others
I'm a thief in the prime of life
A belief that the summer is my knife

A pine tree straighter than a mascara applicator
Bristling and whistling through the needles
Your eyelashes are like needles
How they brown when the sun comes down
And the heat just rises through the needles
Your eyelashes are like needles
Up so tall where a dead phone call
Pumps through the wires, through the needles
Your eyelashes are like needles

Your eyelashes are like
All of your debts

Appears on Eternity of Dimming

Epiphanies and Revelations by Matthew Milia

Epiphanies or revelations
Too tired to label
The fix to your situation
Ah, but you saw the sky
Today and tomorrow
You love me when I’m gone
But don’t you
Run off too far, though
It’s nice to
Have someone to miss

Surprise me once, show me you know me
If I was mistaken, I’m sorry

I ain’t looking to last
Where the sidewalk fixtures’
Shadows are cast
As rosebush songs paint me pictures
Such sterling mixtures of glory
I just want a love that will stay when I turn
My back to St. Lawrence, to see what
Torrents I can burn
So my love will learn that I love her

At the bottom of Dollar Lake is an old truck
And the boards from the bar where my folks first got drunk
And all kinds of litter that flickered and then sunk
To the shallows of our town’s lagoon
Where I say
“How could you love me
When I am so frightened
By the phantoms of my mind and how they are tightened
Around all that I find in this world that’s brightened
By a magic so tragic each day?”
Aw, but love don’t exist neath the realest of coffins
And real ain’t a place that we’ll have to dwell often
Epiphanies will tumble and soften till
Love’s all that’s left to be found

It’s the epitomes of revelations
You’ll all choose the latter
But be so much gladder
With your salvation in the sand
And the fear of sincerity is a disgrace
The shadows of your mind should not take the place
When the turquoise that you find is the kind of trace
That binds to the skin
Inside and within
The light that shines behind your face

Our heads are dead in the dread of tomorrow
And when the sky clears our fears will be hollow
Your suburbs are seasons darkening and sullen
The harbors are fleeting, the waters are swollen
The theater’s erupting, the midway is caving
The streets all connect in a way that needs saving
The parking lot trees are bending and rotten
And so you are too for the love that you’ve gotten
And forgotten
Epiphanies
You’ve forgotten

Ogallala by Matthew Milia

Take me to Ogallala
Where I’m still a new face
Where I have a good case
That I am sincere
Where that night is calling
Where the snow is thawing
Where I have no fear

I remember haunting the darkened landfills
The stars were smoke
But they spoke in short shrills
I held a firm hand
But she turned to lake sand, falling
The trees, the trees were tombstone markers
They kissed each other, blowing darker
In some childhood loss
Elastic chaos

Take me to Ogallala
Where everything real is reeling
Where the transience is healing
Where I stand on my own
Where the wood planks line the floor
And no one knows the horror
Of the truth I did disown

The moon can light those trees in many layers
The highway to Ogallala bears
Five-thousand lakeshores
Five-thousand new doors frozen
The towns I haunt, the world I’m needing
Is just Ogallala’s child bleeding
On that dark-shore gaze
Inside my doorways

The intensity, I know, comes in splatters
But the dreams I see
Are still all that matters
And oh, it’s a great thing to see my road exist
And when my intensity’s consistent
I’ll lead you down, I’ll take your wrist
To Ogallala

Our houses in the snow are filled with patters
But the homes I’ve known
Have been blown to tatters
But the homes I’ve known, they still exist
And when these nighttime lives escape me
I’ll see them there, the homes I’ve kissed
In Ogallala

Weeds and Life Among Them by Matthew Milia

And I remember the song I used to sing
“I belong among the weeds
Amidst the overhanging trees,”
I would sing

And you should remember the song you used to sing
“I belong atop the road
Where the lapping seeds were sowed,”
You would sing for me

And I remember the storm was wet like birth
And the hail would lick the weeds
And the battling of trees
Above the earth

And you should remember the air grew calm and thick
We would lay among wet weeds
And the drops dripped from the trees
Onto our faces, sticking
Like the weeds

Winter and the Preacher's Daughter by Matthew Milia

I know your blurry winter roads
Like the back of the hand that is Michigan
But the things they do to me
Is something I will never see
It’s something I will never understand

She will be standing there
‘Neath the frozen bluff
The moon’s legs will come skating
Down the hill intimidating
And I’ll be harmed by what I’ve farmed in my
Nightmares

Clothes do so very little
When the cold’s coming from the heart
Homes are in the middle
Of the years, that are departed

In the horror, in the terror, in the helpless
Selfishness I found in me

She will be standing there
‘Neath the frozen bluff
The moon’s legs will come skating
Down the hill intimidating
And I’ll be harmed by what I’ve farmed in my
Nightmares

Mona and Emmy by Matthew Milia

Mona’s buying milk and honey
From the summer bins in Milford Market
Outside the door at six
The green bulb clicks on
I work nine to five around the hiss
Of the ice box compartment
When I punch out I want to set
The night to bitter flames a-lickin’
The town and all the passion stricken down

And Emmy’s twenty years removed now
From that morning in July
When her father held her in his arms
And dipped her freckled neck down ‘neath
The river water as flies
Were darkening the brightness
And all of the baptismal whiteness
But darling all those of our likeness
Were born so very ready to live
And to die

I know my way through the neighborhoods
From Mona’s house to the interstate
I know my way to the greatest things we got
Traveling acts, they leave their sounds
For railroad tracks in other towns
But I want to hold to something longer
Something meaner, something stronger
At eleven thirty the town’s alone, again

And Emmy used to say she loved me
Used to be oh so proud of me
When she saw her father in my eyes
When I dipped her golden head down ‘neath
The river water swimming
The pine shine all was dimming
The kitchen panes were pitch-dark within
I thought we were only kidding till
Your father cried

Mona, you’re my only friend
We could take the interstate
Though you know the interstate dead-ends
Will it lead us to the milk and honey
Is the Promised Land just a funny
Way to say the strangeness never ceases?
‘Cause Emmy, you have baptized me to pieces

Appears on Way Upstate and the Crippled Summer, Pt. 2

June Is Our Mother's Name by Matthew Milia

People barking
They’re calling the good old summer down
They’re gonna have a filthy roll around
June

Birds are speaking
They’re wondering why we’re singing
High notes for the air to kiss onto the
Moon

But you love your tune
And I love my tune
And you love my tune
And I love your tune
In harmony they croon
All throughout June
Together they bloom
Something like
It’s a little bit like this

Warm-sex-headaches
Mine’s back again
It’s my only friend, I’m gonna send an old lake-bottom to
You

Insects knowing yards are bathed in light
They don’t sleep at night
It’ll be alright, when my farmhouse is with
You

Haven’t seen you
In years, your fragrance is pouring back
With the mugginess of the black
Midnight holiest way to say
June’s my mother’s name
Too

Appears on I Am the Water You Are Pumping

I Do Need Saving by Matthew Milia

Just like the brown bulbs of your eyes
The stars are certainly dead
But something makes them shine
When I hover right above your dark-bed
And I know it’s not me
Illuminating through your face so well-fed
But it brightens the
Parts of all your skin I ever wanted

You are a dark savior
I do need saving
All our hot behavior
Will not deliver me

The lilac-breath
Is hot and still in
The first hours of the evening
And what is left
In my will when
The lilac-breath is leaving?

You are a dark savior
I do need saving
All our hot behavior
Will not deliver me

And what a dangerous drive that was
So young and dark
Jefferson Avenue
I imagined I blew
The spark of a bullet
Into a tree on Belle Isle
While you were steering
Your father’s giant car
I kept hearing
Far, far, far away
Some childish dirge those
Merging semi-trucks would
Play

How Could I Abandon? by Matthew Milia

Your kitchen window
Where I would do the dishes
Neck-deep in the wash and drunken
Do your windows still glow
Like the gaping orifices
Of a burning pumpkin?

How could I abandon my only companion?
But I did
The night strikes at random
And I was not planning
To dim

Now early Aprils
Fill my nostrils
With the road-kills
Of the skunks
Every spring-girl
Handsome and plural
Are swaying sloppy high-heeled drunks

Now that
I’ve abandoned my only companion
Yes I see
She halved the burden
Now it’s been expanding
And hurting horribly

And it used to be
Early Aprils filled my nostrils
With such possibility
Now the sun’s my maker
And forsaker
Undertaker and
I’m guilty

Pontiac, the Nightbrink by Matthew Milia

The nightfall’s like a house of mirrors
The shuttered deadmall and the Sears
Where my mother worked for years
In the nineties

The drugstore dried out parking lots
A fluorescent crest of snow still rots
Piling in the handicap spot’s
Blind-freeze there

The touching-towns have special wants
M-59 and the salad-bar-restaurants
Something in it always taunts my
Nostrils

When I’m smoking goddamn Pontiac
And the hidden end of the Amtrak
Woodward and the good word crack and the
Exhaust fills the air

Where
A cul-de-sac
Has sweetly softened
The coughing memory
Dulled and black
Far too often
Black ice on the greenery

And all the women
Sap me with their sadness
And now I’m sad too

But Pontiac’s not
The heart of darkness
But freezing on the brink
Where I am at
Some fading starkness
Where the brains of darkness think

The firmly-fixtured-fast-food-beacons
Do not dangle, do not weaken
Neither does the heart I’m seekin’
In you

Mary-Lynn you wouldn’t know
But you do too have holy glow
But how am I supposed to show
You you?

‘Cause your voice through those holy nodes
Marked me like the salted roads
Chalky white, the night forebodes
The coming

‘Cause your throat throttled northtown boys
From the Rochesters and Troys
They will also hear your noise
Drumming low

The wilderness of floating text
The endless half-conscious of present tense winter sex
Do you see how it connects
In me?

Because they touch in such awful blurs
Their cough is full with all it remembers
Draining the stripmall containers
To find me there

Where
The Silverdome, the Palace
The silt-slush road and all its malice
Sweethearted and waiting for me

Your face flushed like a toilet
Where I could only soil it
To unearth all my worth so futilely

St. Joseph is black-ice-gripped
And all the mailboxes are very tightlipped
With the way they know my name

And all the black ice ever gives
Twenty swerving adjectives
Repeating and cheating in our game

In Pontiac the night falls like a whim
Looking back, the night just seemed to brim
Down the track, dangerous and grim
In the black we all look so dim

And the night has a yellow-gray-glow
It’s as though
The whole world’s my halo

The grocery story bright light
Aisles of the night
Piling the blackwhite

The whole strip-mall plaza
Wheezing with asthma
On your miasma

The night has a yellow-gray glow
It’s as though
The whole world’s my halo

The Tower by Matthew Milia

I hope that this summer
sweats through all my clothes so I can taste
some sort of Second-Comer
who’ll blow the lilac-breath into my face

Now I know I’ve had three wives
the first was your ghost, the other was mine
the last comes when the day dies and then
outside the trinity just cries

Frightened by the tower
spiraled with the wild windy night
I only have one father and
I, his only child, fear is my birthright

And who has a redeemer
towering above the summertime?
when sweat will make you cleaner
and spit is all I want instead of wine

We cannot stay broken
or darken violently with summer storm
we will climb the tower
and in the burning morning be reborn

Does Me In by Matthew Milia

Oh the storms come like a sickness, don’t they?
Blacking out the ceiling of the seaway
Mary-Lynn you should begin to blow home
Blow along the ditches of the freeway

When my body’s buzzing like a midway
Mary-Lynn, oh how thinly it stays
When my body’s breaking by the midday
And the touching-towns stretch to the bounds of my body
And all the mounds out from the ground are bulging hotly
Then I know it won’t be long before it finally
Does me in
For good

As we take a ferry to an island
Where all the deafening gusts look very silent
We’re every blackberry in the clearing pickin’
Who knew my slow heart could ever quicken?

When your body’s steaming from the doorway
Mary-Lynn, I have sinned in more ways
Than I could ever tell you with a straight face
But it gets so hot before the chill comes
So much will rot in its welcoming
Sweltering yard
And oh I know it won’t be long before it finally
Does me in
For good

Yeah, the storms have formed some sickness increased
Blacking out the thawing memory at least
Mary-Lynn you should begin to blow home
Nodding off, the bell rings some, the kingdom we did find
The ever-growing holiness we blinded and then put behind
Bouncing with the night-boughs that are heavy with their kind
Rushing with the snow-melt gushing earshot of what’s on my mind

It’s a love too large to use, too large not to lose or abuse

The Upper Room by Matthew Milia

Bad insulation forms
The sad creation of
One heavy eight-foot-long icicle
And there unridden sleeps
The frostbitten frame of
Our sunken-in tandem bicycle
With an endless art for recycling breakfast
And an after-school comfort
Unimaginable
Two costume earrings and
One matching necklace
And two black eyes
Undeniable
Two soiled halves of
One folded mattress
An island on ice
Nice and pliable
There on the floor
There are two bodies tangled
By the price of
Becoming unpryable
But they’re liable to be

Kicking around a small blow-up globe
Of the world that is see-through and
Inflatable
Still holding breath from your last abode
Where we filled it with air
Untranslatable
The thick-carpet-world where the
Streetlamps explode
In the spring
At the dawn
With the smiling tears
Breaking the night as the morning flowed
Through my slight overbite
And your dialing ears
Piling the ways

The planks and the rails of the L lifted up and
Across
Wabash
Like a balcony
And the city’s light returns with its kills and it
Fills up my eyes
With its
Falconry
And I felt very bad you know
‘Cause you’d never been to Chicago
And you’d been bugging me
And then you turn and you see me go
To Chicago with some
Other company
It’s gonna be the way

But our upper room was so insulated that
No holy fire coulda smoked us out
Touching the wounds my fingers penetrated
And they brushed and they hushed and they
Poked about
Three bobby pins on one bedside table
While three soft lamps often blasted out
On two shut-ins in one bulging cradle
Inflated within while there without
A wilderness did grow

So blow up a room and Saran-wrap the windows
In the winter
To make sure
It never leaks
Become entombed in each other’s shadows
That rattle and shift
With the wall and weeks
Two slanted ceilings and
Twelve suffocations
Waiting on hot tongues
But it rarely speaks
Despite one white candle
And night invocations
Bones and a bed frame
That moans and creaks
I see two parents in one sleeping visage
Beneath two soft tufts of swerving brows
Did you sense the burning?
Well that was my message
A marking to come build a room somehow
A burning breathing room

Silverfishes by Matthew Milia

A bright night kitchen moth and the washcloth that I use
For the refuse
That is littering all of your clues
Orion is dead and gone but something in it still
Belongs to me
The bright night I see
High hot-time all the braggarts drag
Their boats down to the water
She dragged down to drown each and every
Brown rag I bought her
The silverfish they ditch their skins as
The Saturday air raid begins
Pitching exoskeletons
Revolting in their molting
Don’t you know I’m just like that?
You can tell where I’ve been at
On every doormat I have sat
A relic so angelic
Oh the once-hard-biting night
Now ruthlessly a toothless sight to see

A shot down Telegraph with a hot laugh as we cruise
Through the sinews
Connecting all of your clues
The blinds they clap for
The napping overheated tangles
Daytime may climb high until the dusk sucks out
All that it mangles
Melting with the blacktop moms
On a bed of palms and psalms
Immersed in the universe
Of off-ramp proms and sitcoms
Sylvan Lake and in between
Perpetually like Halloween
I saw you
In the dormitory with the warming glory
Of the harvest
The pilings of the night are whiling out
Where their forms are the largest

Feeling about half as vicious
As all the silverfishes crawl
If I truly am a coward
Memory-fueled and fear-powered
I’ll be damned
But if I were
That gorgeous blur
I’d be
Sure

A bright night kitchen moth in the washcloth that I use
For the refuse
That is littering all of your clues
Tripped up on the alley weed
Through which I elbowed and kneed
The bottle of my beer emptied
And I was warm and fluid
The body is a bottle, I guess
That I would like to throttle, yes
Mottled skin and spilling sin
And a holiness so stupid
The heaven that I long to see
The undone linearity
I’ve proven
Is all the love I’ve tried to show
Buried where those buildings glow
And ruined?

Ringbearer by Matthew Milia

So look across at St. Hugo
Don’t they say wherever you go
He will follow?
So my dumpster fellow
Let out a bellow
In my name

When my father sleeps the house has lungs
You have heard those songs he’s sung
But sometimes
He wakes up with a start
I hear a confused cry come straight from his heart
And it’s sad

Oh your once-sweet teenage face
Episodically erased
You were perfect
In the safe sitcom vacuum
Ten seasons have been your doom

Oh the springterror
Be my ringbearer
Oh the spring-rot
The sweet-rank taste that I’ve got
When all’s forgiven

Springterror by Matthew Milia

Look at all the steam off the snow
We listen to the Top 40 country radio blow
Listen to the singer, trying to put my finger on who killed who
When it does linger, the sweet nostril-stinger of the spring’s mildew
Was it your will to take his pill orally?
Or did you act perfunctorily?
The lamp-shadow dampness
The safe world of campus
The water of your high school eyes
Some stadium
Some old college tries
There in my stomach the liquor heated
With every place I ever trick-or-treated and
We used to message through the ink of night
With skin still young and pink and tight
Back when the tongue thrust with all of our young lust
The dimple-chin brunettes who make simpleton pets of me
And yes I’m a heel, but with Peter’s keel
I will cut through the lily-pads
The moping mothers and hillbilly dads
And the billboard dentist from White Lake to East Lansing
With his Day-Glo halo sentence entrancing
The moon makes lake-water out to be a filmy skin
But who can begin to tell what skin holds far within
Oh the bathers
Oh the toweling
Your cells are saviors that ring wet bells growling and
You have the black eyes
Just holes filled with night skies
A saddening sweetness through your kid-sister-sighs
Where the Sylvan Lake Corner is flickering with childhood
And the mourner within me feels older than wildwood
And if I knew what part of me was wax
I’d try to truncate it with a black sopping night axe

Ontario by Matthew Milia

I held three strands
But I lost one
Dark as the lands
Surrounding Boston
On the train that backscratched the windows
The backs of the houses, pulsing the rain glows
That sick man so shiny in his slump
Doubled over like a water pump
He was dribbling out from his nostrils
Onto his ankles leaking like Aprils
Yeah the thaw had already begun
We could hear the earshot from your cabin
In the holy boldness your cheeks purpled and pinked
There in the coldness with some sort of instinct
Oh the fluency, me with my hands cupped
Catching currency that you made it erupt
The quiet of spilling right after the stilling
Why it was chilling our hot windowsilling
I see your stature when breathing and turning
Smoking the black blur as if something’s burning
Remember the gray-slate coming of some thrill
The low sky of too-late up on Bunker Hill

And the whirling eddies sprayed off the semi’s tail
The curling snow-traps of your hair
Feeling warm inside the swarms of hail
The foreign planet of some diner we found there

So my brother and I saddle up some horse
And watch the snow thinning with the thawing
Another will die, rattle me so coarse
Will it leave me grinning or awing?

In Ontario

Nerves of the Nightmind by Matthew Milia

All the vegetation in the settled world is stirring
I’m blurring into sun-burnt and heartbroken worrying
About how the day took such a long time to die
When it was reeking of women I once had on my side
But now that I’ve found another smell to believe in
I’m buzzing like hell just to hope I can breathe it
And resurrect the simplistic calm in some eyes
That are trying to find you or
Bury your nightmind
And it will take
Time

Oh your tongue and the twilight marina
When so young and brave and still dreaming
Getting to know you lash by dark lash
The rooms where you sleep in
The floors where you crash
And gas-stations are pleasantly blowing
Thunder rolls for dresses you’re wearing
On a body so unknowing
Of what that blowing’s for or preparing
And patience is never affording
When prettiness and sweetness are pouring
Out from you and
Onto me and
Dampness of sweat is the sweetest recording
And you can lay with your head on my body
The worlds of the night and disease try to rob me
All the vegetation in the settled world is stirring
But stillness and calmness are all that I’m hearing
Now
And it will take
Time

One-Story-Carport-Houses by Matthew Milia

One-story-carport-houses
Shining in their thawing
Shining in their dawning

One-story-carport-houses
Under water towers
Glistening Sylvan Lake powers

One-story-carport-houses
Yards are overflowing
Lilacs and the knowing

That our bodies
Made this season come
Made the children succumb

That our bodies
Made the white-washed town
And glacial lakes strewn all around

There’s winter
Left in the cold wind
But the sky is warm and thin

And our bodies made
One-story-carport-houses