A Diptych
My Daughter Leaving Town
Now you ask me why the sky is like a tank full of lemonade
Is how you cast us available Camaros are a form, reliably
Passing fast we’ll arrive at the ruined horse track’s delicately
Arched brutalist concrete you’re hardly
A body at the foreground of it rolling back behind whatever
It leaves you to be funny and a little buzzing
On cola and this long drive vault us to an attitude
Worth their soft gaze soft lids like the end in images of arches opening
To let them pass the things – publics
reparations, the bound constellations
You are and one’s self after them alone
A necro practice without gothic tracers in fabric
But maybe with their opposite ascetic heroism
a train chimes in after the earlier carried branded orange juice
Right past us listening for the very place
My Daughter the Voice
no I want you to see leaves are gone and white like winter
lets make like a girl mean something amazing commercial
flickered in that dead patch today is where I saw
the cardinal you wanted to see
me get behind the devil so you can master pleasure seeing me
“walk behind this man” the voice said to Duriel so she could live
on the train platform soft and touched to see the suds in the sink lighting
on workmen’s calls and some of the Buddhist advice
bends air before breaking it
bird chatter or kids thread air into each other chiastically
it’s a pressure to impose to feel the shape you’re in
tell me what to see when you can it’s a false spring after two days of rain
we make your skin a hole have us run your voice’s grain
its facts go in boxes whose faces we etch each shave a gain
—
Farid Matuk
Farid Matuk is the author of This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine Editions) and My Daughter La Chola (Ahsahta). He serves as poetry editor for Fence and associate editor for The Volta.