We head back to his after it got too late to be drinking at the.
(Sorry, it's a—) Mess. There's a splash of water on the floor of his bedroom, maybe a rain spot or a spill. A pink dot pokes out from the middle, the size and shape of an egg yolk.
I glance at the ceiling, but no sign of leakage. He remains quiet as he takes me to the bed. As we walk past the strange water and the pink spot, the glitchy sound from the bar returns in my ear, like switching on the radio to a broken station. As a kid, I'd always let the static play to fill up the empty space.
But now. On the edge of his. I press my fingertips to my ears to try to stille the sound, but I know there's no luck since the glitch seems to be coming from inside. Vibrating out.
As if to keep me present in this moment, he performs an action: the slippage of his body over mine. His hands to uncover, I undress. The song in my ear becomes an orchestra booming. A subsequent terraforming. I trace the salt particles on his skin like stars before sleep.
This extract is taken from the longer poem "pink(ing)", from my debut collection "night mode" (Everybody Press). Throughout this piece, I chop the ends off of the speaker's sequences of thought as a form of self-censoring, to mimic a spiral of interiority. In order to navigate trauma(s), and in order to protect ourselves, there is so much our brains (and our bodies) do not allow us to say. When we're really going through it, it's all just a glitch.
Matthew Zapruder’s new memoir Story of a Poem isn’t just about a poem. It’s also the story of a writer, a father, a husband, a son—and this story has a plot twist: The author’s young son is diagnosed with autism. Writing about himself in third person, Zapruder poses the question that lives at the heart of this book: “What is the relation between making poems and learning to be the father of this atypical child?”
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"From my seat alongside Rattlesnake Creek, I looked upstream toward the high-elevation wilderness snowfields that framed and fed the floodplain. The water at my feet had once resided there, and before that it existed as moisture trapped inside a cloud, and perhaps before that as fog, the slough’s breath, the valley’s exhalation, ad infinitum."
