A Poem By Matthew Zingg

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

A Girl Is Standing Roadside Selling Live Grenades Painted as Apples

When I was young I called a rock
a kiss and planted it on the temple
of a friend, hard. And while he was lying
unconscious, bleeding, I said he was
only in love. Sartre told us that
all objects are space we chose to name.
The weight and shape of a sleeping baby
is the thirsty silhouette of a hawk’s beak.
A handful of sand is a stranger
at the far end of the bar. Sartre himself
was the cutout of a bat in the pitch
nights of hell, like us, calibrated
by what we bump against in the dark,
nothing on nothing, a chalk outline
at the crime scene. And this
that you are reading is a silent sketch
of spite or better, abandonment,
an open door, a deep black forest
bristling in the core of the earth.

Matthew Zingg’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in Cider Press Review, Blackbird, The Madison Review, and Opium Magazine. He received his MFA in poetry form Adelphi University and lives in Brooklyn.

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You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.