Lalibela
Have you lost wax?I've lost wax.Have you hollowed stone?I've hollowed stone.There are voices there, you know,saints and rams and cave dwellers,the trash of centuries I collectin a corner with a dustpanI trip over, spilling everything together.My candle the angels gave me flickers.Visitors walk through me, a doorto thin air. I will creak, I will tusslelightly the tour guide's hair.I've lost wax I can't get back.No one seems to notice.That'll be $24.95. I sneeze.You must never sneeze.They'll sweep me up.They'll spackle over you.They'll say I was a giantcome down from the hillswith my pack of wolvesto eat the moon.
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- September 26, 2023
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“Lalibela” from TEMPORAL ANOMALIES: by Matt Broaddus.
Published by Ricochet Editions on September 15, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Matt Broaddus.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Matt Broaddus’s first full-length collection, Temporal Anomalies, is now available. He is also the author of the chapbooks Two Bolts and Space Station. His poetry has appeared in Annulet, American Poetry Review, and The Rumpus. He has received support for his writing in the form of fellowships from Cave Canem, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, and New York University, in addition to a scholarship from Community of Writers and a residency from Millay Arts. He lives in Colorado and works at a public library.
Los Angeles, California
Gold Line Press
"These poems are a wild and joyous embrace from Chaos. Reaching past theory, Matt Broaddus raises the ecstatic stakes of the lyric. With language and consciousness so expansive, at times this feels like a great work of translation. And maybe Temporal Anomalies is a translation. A translation of time, how duration does its work on each of us and everything in our environment. Every line is alive, like a strong tentacle, each holding some wriggling electric new life in its grasp. Get ready for some brain tingles." —Marwa Helal
"Matt Broaddus' Temporal Anomalies is a wonder of new language, wry humor, and experimentation in belonging. Channeling one vocabulary of time and space, Broaddus weaves together a refreshingly and deeply moving world in which the reader experiences moments of ‘feeling in on it’ juxtaposed alongside moments of unexpected devastation and revelation." —Rio Cortez
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