Matthew Caretti

By Matthew Caretti
Pago Pago, American Samoa

        what mud daubers do organ prelude

We’ve been around a long time. A mother’s day ever since Australopithecus Africanus. Things haven’t gone all that smoothly, though. These days we spend our time critical race theorizing empathy. Realize it’s more than a single letter from refuge to refugee.

        morning prayer a lone canary out of the mine

Wildfire embers rise with Mars. Too much pleasure urges more pain. Our brains built for it. Type 3 fun house mirrors bend bones and time. Some circadian rhythm of our sleepless poems. Mental health creeps out of the rainforest. A plot of cannabis a panacea.

        a slow drag in this line butterfly effect

With aching backs we wonder where to put it down. Not there by the murder hornet’s nest, soon to be a threnody of torch and fire. We look farther. Just passing through the looking glass. Does it have to be so literal? Then digitally remastered. Is that a hi-fi sigh in the cellist’s final note?

        wireless fidelity sound of a muted room

By Matthew Caretti
Pago Pago, American Samoa

The N-word never tasted good in my mouth. Something far too bitter in it. Indigestible. Yet growing up among 1970s white rurals, it wasn’t uncommon to hear the epithet. It was never a word at home, but one cutting along the precise lines of a barber shop razor, caught on the fly out on a sports field, wrapped within damp towels at the summer swimming pool and in sync with slamming lockers along school hallways. A sound just perceptible enough.

        sunburn skies a cant of pigmentation

These days I wonder about all the rhetoric. The school board brawls and book bans. The curtailing of curricula. I wake again feeling most unsettled about the coming storm and the words we use. About how to talk to my students about how they talk to each other. I scroll through my own feeds looking for a way to connect with theirs. I want them to know unrest. To know how to get into good trouble.

        lightning strike eye silhouettes after

By Matthew Caretti
Pago Pago, American Samoa

Here the future kraken in an ancient mariner’s tale wags us again. Always some bugaboo stacking spreadsheet zeroes. Each counter-space filled with a pristine ruin.

        times new roman scrawl on Pompeii walls

Realpolitik tumbles toward Earth. Cracks a construction hardhat. In mirrored windows a bulbul studies similitudes. Some continental drift wherein a mountain wanders into itself.

        smoke forest water bombers smear it red

Slow TMZ stream into this DMZ between East and West. Dr. West reminds us in real time of the pastness in the present of it all. Perhaps this flower moon a replacement.

        each burning cross aliens alight on prayer flags

We sit alone together in this time machine, waiting. The end times or time to end the show. The letters on the marquee tumbling down. The hours long gone.

        first fireflies the rocket explodes on landing