Matt Mauch

Bio: Matt Mauch is the author of four books of poetry, Bird~Brian, If You’re Lucky Is a Theory of Mine, Prayer Book, and the forthcoming We Are the Flownover. We Come From Flyoverland. He is also the author of the poetry chapbook The Brilliance of the Sparrow. He founded the annual Great Twin Cities Poetry Read and the Maeve’s Sessions readings at Maeve's Cafe along NE Minneapolis's in/famous Poetry Row. A Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative grant recipient and National Poetry Series finalist, Mauch founded and now publishes the journal Poetry City, USA, and teaches in the AFA in Creative Writing program at Normandale Community College. He lives in Minneapolis. www.mauchmauch.com


As doubly good as the the gift of socks from Mara Mori is the acceptance of an offer to dance at highways speeds

From the backseat of a motor vehicle, I look
into the backseat of a different motor vehicle
and sense connection sensing connection.
Like seventh graders
who only know
how to slow dance
one way, we fall into each other, via gaze,
like a pillar
not holding anything up. Like the ruins
of having previously held. A something
previously assembled into a greatness
beyond the sum of its parts. Like
the species of bullfrog
that jump
and simply never come down.
As if great hand were lifting us, like marionettes,
from the opera we thought
was all there was.


When we gather again, lap to lap to lap around a fire

Like space dust, we will coalesce.
We will tell our secrets and say our hellos in newly native tongues,
with new accents, new idioms,
no subtitles to help us understand.
As with a pop song
we can’t decipher all the words to,
we’ll shimmy, shake,
hit all the vowels
and most of the chorus,
like a marsh
full of returning birds.
Our spirit selves, at first with our hair and our laps,
fresh from our bodies,
will rise
and disfigure, spreading
as a kind of smoke, settling unseen.
We will evolve
into a cemetery,
sure,
in death as in life: an open-air bowl
with no prophet,
no book, no worship, no lid.


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