She walks home from the all girls’ Catholic schoolunder the thumb of March, arms crossed, petalsgrazing her shoulders, wind pushed into her mouth.She knows this street: its laundry lines heavywith pigeons. Parked cars. The gutter’s rough music. It’s the fastest way, but all month the winterhas taken too long to lie down. She wants to bealone, but a carful of boys swings around the cornerof Erdrich, banging the windshield and shouting,tobacco wet between their teeth. She starts to runfrom their voices, the gray street and the car horn’ssallow bleating, the empty shirts on her neighbors’lines making emptier shadows across their lawns.She does what she’s already learned to do:she holds down her skirt and runs deeper intothe life I will enter, its same dark colorsand the maples cold, beginning.
Mother, Sleeveless
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- August 9, 2024
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“Mother, Sleeveless” from NIGHT LOGIC: by Matthew Gellman.
Published by Tupelo Press on August 1, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Matthew Gellman.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Matthew Gellman’s chapbook, Night Logic, was selected by Denise Duhamel as the winner of Tupelo Press’ 2021 Snowbound Chapbook Award and is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Gellman’s poems are featured or forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Narrative, Indiana Review, the Common, Ninth Letter, the Missouri Review, North American Review, Waxwing, Lambda Literary’s Poetry Spotlight, and elsewhere. A recipient of a Brooklyn Poets fellowship and an Academy of American Poets prize, Gellman was also awarded the Adroit Journal’s Djanikian Scholarship in 2020 and has received residencies and fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the New York State Summer Writer’s Institute. His manuscript, Beforelight, has been a finalist for Tupelo Press’ Berkshire Prize, Four Way Books’ Levis Prize, Ohio University Press’ Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, the Alice James Award, and BOA Editions’ A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
“Night Logic is an exquisite suite of poems rendering a family challenged by loss. In the aftermath, a young son becomes a de facto father to his younger brother. And a mother becomes a tragic and heroic figure. Matthew Gellman illuminates this dark domestic space while the speaker of these poems struggles with bullying, violence and his own sexuality. The poems in Night Logic are both mythic and grounded, formidable in their affection and insight.”
—from the Judge’s Citation by Denise Duhamel
“Matthew Gellman brings a level of exactness—in diction, image, and sound—to bear on poems that are intensely personal and yet also generously available to the reader. It is exciting to read work so determined to be truthful; and whose truth-telling functions, bravely, as an implicit political gesture. Beauty is extra; and abundant.”
—April Bernard
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