The Banyan Review: Matt Mauch, April featured interval

Matt Mauch is the author of four poetry collections, including the just-released We’re the Flownover. We Come From Flyoverland., Bird~Brain, and If You’re Lucky Is a Theory of Mine. Founder of the Great Twin Cities Poetry Read and the journal Poetry City, his poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Conduit, The Journal, DIAGRAM, Willow Springs, The Los Angeles Review, Forklift, Ohio, Sonora Review, Water~Stone Review, and on the Poetry Daily and Verse Daily websites. His work has been recognized by the Minnesota State Arts Board and the National Poetry Series. Mauch lives in Minneapolis and teaches in the AFA in Creative Writing program at Normandale Community College.

Mobilizing

 	 	 	 	                                                                        On the home front, March 2020Those who have wondered 
and worried very little

 	 	                  about cows 	 	                will be the first ones

trampled in the bovine riot.

 	          This is not misinformation.

 	           Stroking my air cow, a kind of reparation,  	
I try to replicate the downward pressure

of the eleven-year-old girlwho was petting her cat 	  	 	                  family members say  	 	
minutes before she shot herself.

Both of us stroke with the grain.

 	 	                    Because I may one day be the one  	 	
                  called in to help the police

to talk you off a ledge,

 	 	                    talking you into the arms 	 	                    of a past

 	 	                    I make better than it was,  	 	
                  as with a channel changer,

 	 	                  with some cafe lights  	 	
and foods we could never afford,

I’ll be petting air things all day.

Because my Rotarian impulse (paternal)  is trying to 
out-do-good my Kiwanian one (maternal),

I must pet with both hands. 

 	           Vicewise, I have taken up smoking  	

so that hand and mouth,  	during 

breaks from the petting,  	 	
 	
can enter a kind of belle époque,  	 	
	
                   seeing for the duration of the 
burn

 	 	 	                          with the blur of invincibility,   	 	  	 	 	                           as we saw the wide world  	 	 	
                                   when the brain had yet to ripen,

without embarrassment  	     crossing 
the bridge of the cigarette,

silly in love. 

Matt Mauch

Mobilizing

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