Loudspeaker:: PICK YOUR PREDATOR by Mathews Huey

Writing

Oct 31

Featured

WUSSY is proud to present poetry by queer New Yorker, Mathews Huey.
If you would like to send in a writing submission, please contact Nicholas Goodly.

PICK YOUR PREDATOR

I’ve built an uninhabitable home
for which I cannot seem to find the keys
I retraced my steps back fourteen years
but forgot to bring a flashlight and the street is getting misty
because he said I’m pretty
and I thought he was joking he took a buck knife and cut
my cheek like a piece of Manchego he made me eat
I fucked Machine Gun Kelly
Rob Zombie filmed my willing murder
I climaxed but I could not die
I saw a snared animal gnawing off its foot
it looked like me when I was younger
a poltergeist lived in our neighborhood
he crooned like Elvis Presley well-groomed like my father
and he always wore a suit
of cherry flavored blood a Windsor necktie noose
write a poem as malefic as childhood
nectarous as unwarranted advancements
romantic as Sodom and Gomorrah
two cities kissing in a pantheon of silenced teenagers
there’s a part in every poem when it gets better
that’s what the poem’s therapist said
to the gentle handed preacher
cheefing a cigarette behind the courthouse
with the judge who picks jalapeños off his nachos
says acquittal the same way he asks for extra sour cream
the same way the preacher sits on the bench
at the bus stop and waves each morning
as a poltergeist drives me to school
in a mini-van with a bumper sticker stick figure family
running from the phallic shadow
of a chainsaw because he said I’m pretty
he made me Billy Butcherson
I crossed a bridge and another
bridge and then another bridge to find hell
is a bridge I cannot burn
I keep a scalpel in every drawer
I cut the smile off an image of an inimitable penis
I hug a trash bag the shape of a body
this is not a poem about murder
it doesn’t want you to get the wrong idea
this poem has an imagination of its own
the preacher says to the poem’s judge
to which the poltergeist agrees
if a poem could wink imagine it here
if worms know the difference between dirt
and decomposition then why do they all look like bridges
if I can taste the difference between the poltergeist
and a gunned down duck taped predator
the telepathic resurgence of a summer camp’s communal shower
is a wordy line for a poem about blood bubbling eddies
but the poltergeist is standing on the bridge
behind me with monofilament strings attached to my contusions
I cannot jump because he said I’m pretty
I keep a scalpel in every drawer

—

Originally from Hilliard, Ohio, Mathews Huey's poetry appears or is forthcoming in Living Waters Review, Poetry Circle, The Rush Magazine, Lambda Literary, and New York’s Best Emerging Poets: An Anthology. He won the 2016 Bennett Prize from the Academy of American Poets and holds an MFA from Columbia University. Mathews currently resides in New York City.

Featured