Featured Writer March 11th 2022 - Matthew Wedlock

I feed the lies, dismantled feud of underworld. A rooster and its constellation consume the faults and a promise of wants in our sacraments. An open symphony unknowing in its
seam. We have no sound and the structure is boxed in winter split/spit. Old, Dividing, Bow, Door. Create, Open, Guard, Threshold. We keep the ones we love in the walls. Our homes, a jail — so we return to be yielding at the hearth: white bread and mayonnaise offered. Winter's door, thumbprint on a windeye's light, cage bearers. Bird's wings, a sheath not through the world. Embodied in the snore of family conjoined — the bone: clavicle, holds us with a bent iron pin, as if to say: I have and you have not. The unowned edges of a number; some wheel of the year bent into an origami of I have not and you have. When my eyes are closed, a virus bellows, the pink sponge squeezes vinegar over christ. Some wagon of doom rattles the frame of this house, our mystery recedes, it makes less sense, this mimicry mouth. Render. I give back.I have not, and you have not. Let this misgiving be named. Make jam and hang it on Christmas amber. Thy genome does without borders. Different, make different. We eat of cod memory, red fatty fish, the eggs shed will not hover high. Iron weights our bones. The open heart, a cabinet without. Schemes endured for provision. They feed me still and still me.


wi
sh
95.







"That's an uncertain smile.” its a wince I think, but pull back the curtain mid sentence, there is change of channels --
foliage spills from your mouth, an owl takes a snake ancestor in the sickbed wishes.
there's a something— static decades scratched from the skull in yellow: the pupils saw color.
A dust worm — locust, swell the night class lights illuminate deer eyes;
Roses on horn tip by nightstand on this corridor of junctures
it's there.
I rode Red bike through lace, closing gates.
that's not a tree for
I know there is a biting cruel, it ripens
a lark— being your song is always gesture
I thread a corolla between this stranger, their gut fiends for a homing beacon. Every single buttermilk shrunk between ten this morning and close at your local grocery store is waiting for you to open the door. It resists: spell; I page for grocery to release the bone mouse to run free along the sky shelves in fecund curving streams. Saturn circles the moon — a road beyond Santragachi is marking you home--
winds stutter, fatigued beyond autonomy
conceding to a glory hole hospitality state
I was told, explicitly, not to leave this booth. You say
don't follow me
from here follow me
from here
I rode Red bike through
lace,
seven refugees, guards at half doors, shipping bots, groomed seniors--
it's there.
in caves and paddocks and soil, by ten or now, an opening named something like “it's not there.” maybe like bones until new plan can advert, prism and grain concuss — sludge, them; I in riding hollow steer something rougher.
I is voice with roll base murmur “Da”, passed through mine, stay in mouth for some to get or eject.
I am granted line authority, receive burn victims at dusk on strobe ribbon of road— a reclamation project.

Matt Wedlock is father to Shae River, partner to Kristen Wedlock, adjunct professor, grocery store clerk, astrologer, and is a graduate of Naropa's Jack Kerouac School of (Dis)embodied Poetics 2012. M. can be found @honeyandseaweed on Instagram & honeysucklesea.squarespace.com.

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