POETRY : TRUCKER & TRASHCENDENT by Lucian Mattison
Lucian Mattison is a recent transplant to the Bay Area and we are happy to welcome him, and his lovely writing to the Bay Area scene. His newest collection Curare (C&R Press) is poetry with grit-in-the-teeth, a compilation of vignettes both brutal and beautiful. The press release says it better than I can: “At their core, the poems acknowledge the tragedy of humanity’s self-made tools of destruction and, at once, ask us to hope that these same tools can become remedies”.
Lucian did us the great favor of recording not one, but two of his poems from the new collection.
Give them a listen. Go grab a copy through the link below.
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Curare
Lucian Mattison
C&R Press
Trucker
by Lucian Mattison
He says to the truck stop stray
dog, somos todos bichos, bicho. He knows
he’s the bee, flower a diesel engine—
extinction and exhaust indistinguishable
from the cost of labor. Tio Mario grew up
a pig farmer before driving. As a kid,
he caught bats in nets strung from chicken wire
and branches. He’d hold a creature’s face out
like a holy cross to his cousins—San Roque,
San Roque, que esos niños no me toquen.
They lit cigarettes, fit a filter between
the creature’s little mouth to make it smoke.
Every bat’s breath was a fury.
That was childhood, field ecologist
pouring old engine oil onto good earth
and drinking the groundwater below.
Some things are best left behind. Jobs
are redefined. A semi-truck watches
its driver beat his wings like two wipers
against the torrential rain. The blind
do not unionize against sound
logic. A giant hand reaches in, clips a wilted
flower—no quepan los insectos, bat navigating in
echoes. Smoking hulk pipes through
the night on auto-pilot. And the driver, side-
saddle to its replacement, hangs by the ankle
from the exhaust like a wet flag,
looks down at a sky full of stars below him.
Trashcendent
by Lucian Mattison
Let’s stuff newborn mouths with plastics,
wear 50-gallon trash can liners as furs, zip-tie
disposable dinnerware to the end
of a Swiffer mop spear. Dip palms in an ink pool
of cracked toner cartridges and get handsy
with the inside of a cave wall. Let’s swap bloodlogged
organs for lightweight hoses and pouches—lungs
are vacuum bags, liver a distiller’s retort.
Pilgrimage is inevitable and the highest form
to which the body aspires. As the Buddha,
printed on yoga mat, instructs: let capitalism
kill itself with speed, let mind be riparian
and float out into the ocean. The self
is the gyre’s pull, Pacific garbage patch
the last pristine place. The earth rests its empty head
against the breast of universe, she disposes
of the bodies. We melt into a living collective.
A sea turtle lays eggs in my stomach. Anchovies feed
on the skin of legs wilted toward ocean floor.
Spongy bones are a network of caverns, fill
with salt water and shrimps. Decades of nail growth
curl keratin coral branches over fingers, and my hair
is an endless kelp stipe plumbing the depths,
its slight curve an echo of the earth’s rotation.
