The Splendid World by Matthew Milia

This year's robin's breast is not as red
The entire nest is underfed
Every bed I've made has broken down

The AA meeting is letting out
From the parking lot where my mother let me try out
Driving my grandfather's car when I was just fourteen

If the splendid world wants to end and rid us
I wish it'd just get on with it and forbid us
I can't keep track of what I own

My brightest day was poisonous but agile
And then you decay in a way so fragile
In the sticky shade with an ice cream cone

Whatever happened to the little sailboat
We kept behind the shed but only once made float?
I used to climb upon it onto the roof

And now the earwigs climb the trashcan
I figure I'll become a sort of watery man
Pissing in my night backyard
Distributing the proof

You can keep a record of all your meals
And the way that each day feels
Safe and well-preserved in some hidden cavity

But all your private and precious locales
All your hidden heavens and all your pals
Are gonna succumb to the brutal gravity
Baby I know

The splendid world is immune to flattery
It burst me on the sidewalk like a run-over battery
All my metallic innards come pooling out

To try to name this is to be less famous
If I were dumber and detestable I'd be more successful
But on the sharp scorched grass
There's nothing else to sing about

Appears on Sitcom Afterlife

Careening Catalog Immemorial by Matthew Milia

There's a white limousine with Massachusetts plates
And on the loose its occupants, those 90s prom dates
Careen

I tongue at my molar, you're my only consoler    
You're my midnight buyer in the back of the Meijer
Yeah

My world's a comprehensive private diorama
Unpunctuated by any comma
You got

I was a queer balladeer, so proud of our new minivan
You know your dad gave all he had
He does his best for you just when he can

Greenfield Village and a field trip version
Of young faces on every person
I knew

Now all the modern dilettantes
They typed out their privileged isms
In their moronic fonts
And hyped-out syllogisms

With some get-well cards from my date-stamp aunt
Yeah, I'd frame all that minor fame, but I just can't

When my best friend Doug's brother had some flashy two-seater
All the sleepover soda when we explode a splashy two-liter

The stoplights are cherry red, or very greenish blue
Like the mushy color of the 7-Eleven slushy hue

And the liquid wicked warping
Of an ambling ambulance's distancing pitch
I hooked my thumb through your belt loop
From which I hitched to every twitch
You made

What we found stashed in the trashed-out woods
Behind the Taco Bell
Is why I identify
Early sex with the oily smell

Of WD-40
And a blindness to the ways
Of the kindness behind us
Andthe lukewarm heat lamp buffets

Now we report all our pathos to the food court police
Where the pity and the loss grow so shitty and obese
And sad

But in Baker's frozen woodlot
With the smiling sniffling good snot
You tried to wipe away but you could not
When the sun's explosion
And slow plummet
Can look so frozen
As we glow from it

All our disastrous love
It goes by many titles
It froze inside the snows where I'd
Dropped it with its broken vitals

But I remember your sorrow outside of Espresso
With all you wanted to borrow, and all I said was "I guess so"

And I wish I had
Just granted you that

Appears on Eternity of Dimming

Open It Up by Matthew Milia

Hard-hopin' 
I can open
It up

Heartbroken
And soft-spoken
Ain't we all grown up now?

Mary-Lynn, when you call to me
There is little I can do
And you want to bring it all to me
Well, you know, I'd want you to

But seeing as there is no place
Seeing as there is no trace
I do not know if I can taste it
Anymore

Now I rub each tear duct with my hands
When someone's foreign bathtub product brands
Stung my heart and plucked my glands
Because it understands the smell
You wore

That's when I follow my dad down
To the video rental store
Mentally explore
The glorious
Phantasmagoria

To some sunny summer family reunion in a soccer practice park
Through a dark grainy camcorder
With '1994' in white numbers on the border of the lower right corner where you
Were quite pixelated by the men in the tans
Beside the subtly outdated minivans
In turquoise polos as the boys blow 'O's
Through the dirty mustaches they grew
Smoking Merit cigarettes you inherit from Papou
Pulled from soft packs in an '89 Buick Park Avenue
In slacks on the pickup lane cracks of the Catholic K thru 8 his great grandson goes to

There's a dead world locked in a Nintendo 64
In some divorced friend's mom's apartment bedroom drawer
And a chandelier of chrome in her white brick apartment home's
Shared stairwell where the farewells blew
And sag with the bags
Of sidewalk salt

You cannot disown
Your middle-school cologne
And the tedium
Is the medium that connects
All that is holy
I was the goalie
Who let in an infinitude of
Worlds
That I can't possibly disown
The snow
Ossified to bone
And got stained so black
By the track of the sliding doors
Of the modern cell phone stores
Chaldeans smoking sweetly
As the deeply dim night pours
For you

There's a meteorologist
On the local news
Whose hand I got to grip
On a fifth grade field trip
He's no long young-dad hip
For he's now as old as all of us
Would ever want to be
And the weather, we foresee
Will be better endlessly

Once Nana's
Backyard swallows us
The lawns aren't cut too short
And they abut the tennis court
And our ages are not cages
That we cannot re-assort

Oh, the obsolescence
Of your adolescence
Heavy as a copy machine
Gargantuan, elephantine
In an old friend's dad's 90s home office
With off-white purring processors
And PC blurs on monitors
They can't display the past so they
Just mark their time and darken

I'm just
Hard-hopin'
I can open
It up

Appears on Eternity of Dimming

Dealerships by Matthew Milia

The muffler smoke
Does lovingly choke
The community college's dusk parking lot
The potholes soak
Because the ice broke
And jarringly jolt us till the shocks are shot
And the carports are revving with warming-up motors
With throats that are heavily fuming exhaust
And I taste who I am when I breathe the odors
And all that was feral is sterile with frost

And it feels so good
Feels so holy
My world should
Soon control me
And I know that I would
Like it to

The shrink-wrapped cosmetics and cardboard aesthetics of department store picture frame inserts that my
Mother keeps under a sink in a cupboard with her high school diploma and it hurts to try
To keep all our treasures intact for forever in fact they are cluttered and muttering sighs
The pipes froze and ruptured and so now her cupboard is full of possessions that she can't keep dry

I see wild geese in the drainage ditch east
Of the hotel chains behind Thunderbird Lanes
When I go do some banking, rigidly thanking
What the frigidness deems and the extremes it contains

And the funeral home, pharmacy, bar and grill are to see
Me to the white and bright sports domes of youth
But all that was docile's now frozen and hostilely
Clenching her denture where once was a tooth

Behind the Home Depot parking lot
The cold woods decay
The homeless they go and squat
And wrestle their way

The old lovers spurn
And the new lovers enter
The bitter night burns
In the bottle return's sticky center

Where
The dealerships garishly light up the parish where we
Wore Catholic uniforms from K to 8
The winter it frigidly deals out a litany
Of auto parts from car wrecks at the Secretary of State

Dealerships, dealerships in the night townships
Where my allergist's magazines were from the late
1990s when dealerships dealt out
Pleated-pant children belting in lots
Shelter their snow-boots in sweltering showrooms
Or a storage space that radiates ten-thousand watts

And then
I'll meet you out where the outlet malls turn to black holes
I'll greet you cradling obsolete remote controls
To television sets in entertainment cabinets
From lost living rooms of trampled carpets
Of VHS sun-bleached cassettes and teenage trophies of plastic soccer nets
And the clip art signs are cartoonish on diners
Which are actually grimmer than hell in the night
And a bright CVS might make me obsess
But at least I have found what is mine in the light

And it feels so pure
Feels so singular
Still and sure
That's the thing you were
Meant to see when you
Went through the
Dimming world

Those blaring bugs wouldn't leave me alone
And it's not that I deserved their letting
The autumn tugs and the summer moans
And pretty soon winter was setting
And if safety is the one thing
I knew never would harm me
Last hot fall
I put all mine
In a Salvation Army
On the borderline of losing my mind
And pitifully making excuses
On the borderline of sweetness I find
In Rhode Island and Massachusetts

Appears on Eternity of Dimming

In Protection of Sylvan Manor by Matthew Milia

I'll be swimming in the ditches
With the brimming snowmelt
With unexplainable fishes
And the plopped-down mallards belt out
For vouchers of pizza coupons
Surrounding the mailbox
And drowned in the lawns
There with me

Yes, some spiny heart grieves
For our occasional escape
In its artichoke leaves
That our bottom teeth familially scrape
Then discard on creased paper plates
As a knife extricates what's released
And the heat levitates

Does your dad fall asleep
With the remote in his hand?
Does a digital beep
Promote gentle reprimand
To share all your love
Like the threadbare cloth of
Some T-shirt your mom wears
From a tournament of soccer you played
In 1998?

He bakes blank birthday cakes
In the grocery store flicker
And the hard plastic cases
He seals with a sticker
With a bar code and what's owed
And in a gossiping snicker
The birthday-boy moms
With expired pom-poms gravitate
To personalize one
For her first and only prized son

I cannot sleep
With this language snowing so deeply
In my head
Dim soccer goals
And non-marking gym soles
With which I walk through instead

The archaic layout of the buildings that play out
My past as I'm lying in my bed
They will not stay out and so the only way out
Is to worship these worlds with my face red
Blushing beauteously
Rushing circuitously
Shaking with every endorphin
Constantly mesmerized
By all I've memorized
Leaving no place as an orphan

I perfect my conveyance by directing a seance
From an eighth grade computer lab station in the basement
Where the latchkey kids feel like a non-factor
And the black-ice skids call the strip-mall
Chiropractor
To the sweetly faulty parents
On their white-stained salty errands

Nonetheless, I digress
I walk through
Each janitor's closet
And lavatory faucet
And desk configuration
And signature validation
On a permission slip nervously forged
Clarifying tenuous eras of my penmanship's formation
The holy gradation

For the coaches that wronged me
And my sense of belonging
There's a song I can taste when the braces are tightened
And the forceps clamp and the summer is heightened
And my mouth is the amplifier that voices its name

Well, no two-bit piece of shit interloper
Is gonna touch my world or molest my hope or
My kingdom that lingers in each drawer I open
When I open it up I'll be groping at what is for damn sure
In the dimming of Sylvan Manor

Appears on Eternity of Dimming

If the Summer by Matthew Milia

Oh, if the summer
Leafy screens
Of the undersides of bushes
Took me in like time machines
I'd crawl out
Red-faced
2006
And set my mind to find you
Inside the library bricks
And with your date-stamper
You'd brand my hand
I'm the nervous camper
Who would happily choke on the woodsmoke
To lie next to you where you woke
In the sand

Oh, what a bummer
Not to re-begin
Not to have a sunburn
Marrying the sum of our skin
And in some very small rooms
Where we'd sweat through the sheets
I'd curse the hour that it all blooms
And just pray to God it repeats

M.A.C. and Elizabeth
Sweating through the
Sheets with
A memory and a myth
The balcony of Meredith's
Apartment

Blinded my eye sockets to the
Sight of Marian
The youngest memories burst
Like a sun
In the hot black night I
Found my contrarian
If any girl is cursed
She's the one
And I am the curse
I am the worst

Oh, if the summer
Lake and pool
Cease to make my body
Feel so young and cool
For I've been burned so badly
In the worst way
By squandering so sadly
By being cruel
In that way

Appears on Eternity of Dimming

Surgery by Matthew Milia

I approach my coach to tell him
The anesthesia wore off
And then a loose cough
Crackles accolades in spades
For me

So they pour us up to La Rosa Market
Maybe you meet us with the Taurus
And you park it there

The air is sweet with bare summer feet
And cucumber-scented hair
The sun is wetting heads
Of sweating girls
In pretty smells
It swells and swirls
Then wanes

And the surgical wound
Is twisted deep
Like the sheets on a summer bed
And I'm marooned
In the summer weeds
Behind Sylvan Lanes instead
And all the life behind Sylvan Lanes
It wanes till it is dead

Keego Harbor trailer park
Beneath my parents' Upper Room
They had one too
Pet love in the sweat of
Forgetful heavenly days
I got some Mackinac Island caricatures
Where my toothy youth decays

When we would take Orchard Lake Road
To the St. Mary's Fair
Your first cellular phone
And the tone of the blown-out speaker
Lying supine on the pebbly asphalt
Electrically whine through the trebly assault
As the sidewalk calk, yeah the fault-lines
Scuff your sneaker

Disposable camera prints
Leaning in the doorjamb squints
The figure of my dad
And the body he had
When he was shirtless and virile
He'd drive me to intramural
Or the soccer travel fear
A Chevy Cavalier
And though I was puerile
My comfort was near

I genuflect on the kindergarten rug
Where I chugged all my pure light
A clunky TV cart and the sunken eyesight
A sleepy-eyed departure of a dream

Now I'm feeling like a phony up at Kerby's Koney Island
And the parents tick in decades
And the pathos just parades its wickedness
So sad
All the love that we had
Dissolves to an abyss
Of summer ski-hills
Where my newcomer skills
Once skidded in wintriness
Till the kid crashed

And red-faced shame
Is the world's only aim
When my spoiled Christmas gifts got stashed
I could hear strange percussion
In the depths of the concussion
Like the fireworks that once splashed
In Sylvan Lake
Then some pungent summer deodorant
Forced me to awake
To my mother's laugh

Appears on Eternity of Dimming

Nightmares of Space by Matthew Milia

What can it mean to go it alone
To quarantine the moments we've known
And lock it away
And bury the throne
Of a hot summer bed in my heart?
It's not smart

To try to die
When something so soft's standing by
But why should I
Deserve something only to lie?
I don't know why I should
Or whatever let me do it
But if your sweetness
Could defeat this for good
I wouldn't hold you to it

Placing the nightmares of space
Between myself and the dearest face
That I could ever try to recall
At all
And if each threat
That we came to regret
As we'd shout it
At the outlet mall

Still dissolves there
Broke and bare
The worst shame
All the same

What can I do but become estranged
From the truest true that the world had arranged
For me to cling to
But only deranged
Sad as a dumpster at night?
It's not right

To kill the chill
That defines the warmth there inside
I'm ill and most likely will
Never get right there inside
But oh, the pride

When you were the one who knew me
I cried
When the angels of heat flew through me

Appears on Eternity of Dimming

If the Suns Collapse by Matthew Milia

My oh my, you're so far away
By the time I see you
The sky may look so evil and gray
Or perhaps, we'll take naps in the sun
If the suns collapse
We'll make laps on the run
And run forever
'Neath their punishment
But punishment is not what you deserve
You were meant
For something they reserve
For early mornings
When your heaven is blurred
Blurred and vague
Each word does age so fast
Like a plague
It's not allowed to last
For very long but how
Fantastic and strong
While it does, while it buzzes free
All that was still courses
Through me
Infinite tons, liquid gallons
Of stunning suns

In some brittle part
Of my little heart
I know I can
Plan a way to stay
And say

My oh my, you're so far away
If I die, it could be today
And all I see
All that I free will be
Okay

Appears on Eternity of Dimming

Eternity of Dimming by Matthew Milia

August obliterates trust and it's in sun-dust I'm found
Home to swill the shrilly insect sound
Stumble to the Dairy Queen
Thumb a People Magazine
Glossy as the bright leaf greened and drowned
In the light

An eternity of dimming
You turn to me, I'm slimming
The graininess is winning every night
Clarity's a rarity that once was just beginning
Now hellish unembellished foreign blurs
In the corners of my eyesight

In this local exit highway night
We must grow accustomed to the sight
And empty all surprise to see the capsize of the semis

'Cause nothing will stop the world's physics from working
Or the manner in which it's situated and lurking
Permanently, so externally
But there's pleasure and death in each second
To be reckoned with

And there's boredom and sex within each wild minute
And the mildest hour has some deadly power in it
And maybe I'll cower with Yia Yia's silk flowers
As the motion sensor light does brighten and sour

On the back patio where the raccoons go
Whining and divining through the grainy night glow
The same as me as I'm fumbling to see
An inch off my face with a pinch of disgrace

Each photo of the summer is one in the same
With a bloodshot number in the corner of the frame
Dating each time that we became
Memorialized in the
Dimming

An eternity of dimming
You turn to me, I'm slimming
The graininess is winning every night
Clarity's a rarity that once was young and brimming
Now hellish unembellished foreign blurs
In the corners of my eyesight

A bat circles above my brain
As I walk down St. Joseph in the dusky
Graininess, yes this gorgeousness is
Growing too dark
To mention

What becomes of the summer skin
When it disintegrates in
The blackness of the past?
At last, I've become
An extension

Of the dimming

Appears on Eternity of Dimming

I Met Rebecca by Matthew Milia

I met Rebecca in the summer I forgot my tally
In the back, behind the bowling alley
Where my street
Ends

She opened all the blinds up in my room
She pried open my mouth
And out spilled my gloom
Just as it sometimes
Tends to

We walked up to the point
On Sylvan Lake
It got to the point
That our skin burned and baked
So we dove in

When I met her father
Our clothes were still wet
When I met her sister
Those secrets were not told yet
I wish they'd never been

By 9 p.m., all of them
Carport lights are on
They buzz on through
What does ensue
Till they blend into the dawn

I met Rebecca in some house
In a dream I had
Murderers and worshippers
And random fandom stabbing at us
Till we made an escape

Where she wore some dresses
That to my eyes were gossamer
And the hard truth impresses
That I'd die at the loss of her
So I wrap it up in ribbons and tape

By 9 a.m., all of them
Metal things reflect
The nightmares and the bright sun-glares
That force me to protect
My love

Appears on Eternity of Dimming

Bike Trail by Matthew Milia

On the bike trail of pale white chalk
Where I surveil the loading dock
That's chipping in the wailing shock
Of the mercilessly electric creatures

The deranged men who shirtlessly stalk
The desperate features in their walk
Until they melt like boiling caulk
On the metal of the blacktop bleachers

The summer has an open hymen
The Sylvan Manor baseball diamond
Rattles hot with tattletales
So frailly shot into the night

Christopher keeps the receipts
For all the love that no one eats
In the glassy office complex suites
Behind which the ditch heats and squiggles

Where all the deathlike little birds
And the yearlings in their little herds
And the perversion of my words
Gets trapped and sweats and frets and wriggles

In a grouping of the tower spines
And the flaccid drooping power lines
Where I'm recouping what is mine
From the placidly eternal

Hot day when the sprinklers vent
A burning rubber aqua scent
And evaporate all that I've meant
About the mercilessly electric creatures

But how do they hone the drone and tune it
To the gargle of the backyard AC unit?
It rattles hot with tattletales
So frailly shot into the night

Appears on Eternity of Dimming

Granduncles of St. Lawrence County by Matthew Milia

Papa's standing sort of bovine
In the shrine of his brother's room, the priest
Recently deceased in this North Country heat
Lunch meat on the kitchen counter
Mary's counting bug bites on a sunburned shoulder
I'm counting sacramental rites and old crucifixes
All my great-uncles' nights of cocktail mixes
Are over
Then we encounter
Accidental modern radio hits
Spits his brother's boom-box
From the room walks Papa and then sits
And then it's
Time

Where the handicap tourist-trap putt-putt courses
And trailers patched with corrugated scrap metal and divorces
Stand
Well, I got a granduncle and he lives inland
Where the pure manure summer vapors get fanned
By electric fence whir and a wave of the hand
Of the Amish infants standing barefoot in the sand
While the gas-station kids hang out idle and bland
At the Subway

Well, him and Anne died down in some dim town
Where he built a swimming pool into the swampy farm ground
Where the accumulation of the dimming pounds down
Since the 70s

The pool
Has a cool blue aqua shade
Like the Gatorade that my dad likes to drink
Where you'll peer into the pump-house, dear
Or the diving board where you laid on the brink
But please don't freeze or fade
Like the bottles of booze
That snooze beneath the sink
And if my reasoning gets frayed
It'll cauterize us tauter ties someday
I think

When the roofers jump in the seaway
At midday in their jean-shorts to cool down
We'll go down to Morristown
And bask there in the decay
And ask where our summer glories drown
With the subtle carnage of the bloated rock bass
Sucking in the bright sky summer boat gas
Floating there
As we boated past
Slinking through the stony Thousand Islands
That go sinking in the water with the slickest absence of violence

But
In the musty attic loft
I knew your young sore ecstatic soft
Body

The waitress' language was blaring out, "Can you
Bear the despair of the typos on the menu?"

I wheeled you through the field with the billboards
You wheeled the Ford to the sordid Price Chopper
Where every shopper was leaning in the struggle to stand
Like the green copper-stained gravestones that sink into the land

That night
Earthworms were squirming their way through my dark feel
Some sermons found permanence on ancient-burned reel-to-reel

If permanence is arbitrary
Who decides the summers where we will
Be forever?
I'd like to meet that thing
It's a dimming thing

Appears on Eternity of Dimming

I Buried You So Deep by Matthew Milia

Abigail, I buried you so deep
It's a wonder that they found you
Down by where the pregnant lilacs weep
Well I guess I should have drowned you

But the water was froze up
And your memory rose up

I've made many beds in many towns
Hung like heads 'neath starry crowns
You're the only weight I could wish for
But you don't pin me anymore

And the buoyancy abounds with a pull
Nothing ever drowns full

The water was froze up
Your memory rose up

Abigail, I buried you so deep
I remember when I found you
Down by where the pregnant lilacs weep
I remember when I found you

Appears on Eternity of Dimming

The Black-Ice World by Matthew Milia

Out in the night the world freezes
It pleases me only to know
They say in the wilderness Jesus
Felt his moment slow

I’ve stayed inside for a few nights
Been four or five in a row
Outside the teeth when the frost bites
And pretty girls go
So
Slowly

The world’s frigid harshness
Is clear in the darkness
Your soft skin is clearly unwelcome
Your soft heart is part fear and part dumb
But I love you more than I can stomach
And the world’s love is a frozen phantom

Out in the night the world freezes
It teases me outside to go
Silent and sterile the peace is
And deadly it steadily blows

Appears on Eternity of Dimming

Junk-Drawer Sorrow by Matthew Milia

As the windshield wipes and exhaust pipes
Are coughing out some winter
It’s a splinter of what I once contained
And I suppose the whole world glows
A little for the squinter
But you recall when all that fire rained

And nothing very solid
Ever thaws away the squalid
Junk-drawers that us whorish people know
And while the junk collects interminably
Other things will certainly
Thaw away so swollen with the snow

I’ve mythologized the worlds you’re from
The nervous taste of chewing gum
Some high school faces
Basements you protect
But in the spring a cork I’ll find
In the side-yard to remind
The New Year’s souvenirs
I must collect

The sun looks pretty hot today
The snow’s about to rot, they say
So maybe I’ll drive all the way to Lansing
If nothing’s able to stay static
Perhaps we left some strips of fabric
Bloodied up and streaming
In the fencing

And is it possible
That the hospital
Is waiting for all?
Without stall it will bawl all
The life out of you

But nothing is ever lost
The piled past is cataloged and tossed
Into where it is stored in
Some vestigial organ
It pumps inside of me
The bile and the memory
The bathroom tile of ivory
The carpet sponges so absorbently
Nothing is ever lost
Nothing is ever, ever lost

By now I’ve declared you drive a hard bargain
It’s a pardon every time I hear its name
When my tongue’s stung by every dripping juice-hole in the garden
My world goes mute, my cute words dumb and lame
For the dental office arthritics and mental softness heart-critics
Who can’t process me or the sophistry I live in
I will pluck the soft weight of ripe love
The sticky teenage-sweet type of
Respite that the black night bites are given

Where it's probable
I’m unstoppable
By all that tries
To chastise the damp eyes
My world contains

Appears on Eternity of Dimming

Birthday Girl by Matthew Milia

Birthday girl
Blue dress
Soft face embrace
In such foreignness
Three birthdays
This spring
Mark this darkness
With some blossoming
The deep world
I knew
It was because
Of you

Although the Volvo is running well
I can smell some
Sorrowful fumes

The blacktop of the IHOP was
Scorched for us
A chorus of buzzing
Street-lamps still looms

Hotel rooms, Oregon
I can't keep up the recording
Of our days, so slick
Bit my nail down to the quick

After the laughter does rise and swell
Like a bell
It falls back to earth
There it is, it perishes
Where it fell
Straight to hell
Now, what is it worth?

But birthday girl

Appears on Eternity of Dimming

Thermostat by Matthew Milia

Meet me in the Christmas mall
If this fall I’m swollen
With hot air the heaters blare
Which no one is controlling
And filling up my entire world
And making me feel so young
But old enough to notice that
The thermostat has been stolen

Hey, my best friend
A smile so narrow
Can point like an arrow
To the end of you, and
Oh, how we tend
To pray soft and lowly
For past worlds to slowly
Mend and then
Render tenderly

A brilliantly thawing overpass
The slush shoots out sun like a magnifying
Glass in your eye
Oh my, what it can imply
Makes me cry
You were not so impatient then
Commuter stations of black-night men
God, it makes me think of when
Where was enough without why

Hey, Mary-Lynn
Some moments are frozen
And constantly chosen to win

The grin from within, yeah

Oh, it's always been
So why weep over
Some grade-school sleepover again?
It disintegrates and
The red-faced shame mates with beauty

But in fifteen years
Somerset Mall will be
Just like them all
Summit Place
Dump it all to waste

Is that just what you do when you get bored?
Send a postcard to the Lord
Of the opposite gender
No need to stress, no return address
To fear it may come back to sender

A deer knelt down on the midnight crown of
Someone's front lawn bathed in our headlights
They're white as suns but now we're the ones
Flooding other people's windows with brights

Oh, my little punctured cup
What am I gonna do with you?
Every time I fill you up
There’s something spilling out of you
And filling up my entire world
And making it all so wet
I do believe I can never leave
Every person that
I’ve ever met

Appears on Eternity of Dimming

Black Holes by Matthew Milia

Though there are so many black holes
The JCPenny and the back of Kohl's
Where rot a lot of things
I can't say

Oh Nicole, your trailer park
Can console any darkness
Spooled around the ground-floor patio
Where the tomatoes
Once cooled in your young night
Don't let it dim your eyesight

Of the divorced split-level mansion
The exit of forced expansion
Now miniatured
The furniture sharpens its imprints
Into the carpeting since
We've dozed off and napped
Is it preserved and plastic-wrapped?

Little Caesars, birthday night
Our dads have seizures and they bite
Their tongues before the rug-burned floor
Where we learned how to die
Where we wrestled, laughed, and tickle-tortured
Till our love made us cry

So Jacqueline, when are you coming home?
Your organ bench is warped and wrenched and so
Many nights I see your bedroom window lights
I guess the widowed ghost ignites

Because they left that house in Union Lake
And I had my First Communion cake
In a weight-room clubhouse of their apartment
Where the freeway air of 275
Rushed when they were still alive

So I extend my endless thanks
Grandchild pranks and oxygen tanks
Hissing to the daytime TV
Where you and me
Crossword puzzles, I was ten
With some promotional pen

And now the doorknobs and windowpanes are
Dripping wet
The dead night is pressing tight against
The glowing light of a heated home tonight
The time machines of television sets
Oh, Mary, let me see that lotto-heart
Let the auto parts break down and die
Wheel around the squealing sound of a
Shopping cart
Smile down the grocery aisle till you
Softly hang your head and start to
Cry
For a while

In Waterford, the discount stores
Sneezing in the freezing rain pours
Sunken women drunken on some far-fetched wrenching dreams
Drenched in Starter jackets of their favorite first-grade teams

Though there are so many black holes
Jacquelines and orphan Nicoles
I know
They all know
Love

All the girls in their smooth teeth
Jot death dates on their loose leaf
I don't know if I'll ever die

Appears on Eternity of Dimming