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    • Fall | 2012 Reading
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MATTHEW ZINGG

Your Voice is a Large Stone Grinding Away the Walls
    
            to Flannery O'Conner


Often I dream of night falling in peacock trains that barely light the earth,
and from the porch of a county seat dragged out of red clay--its pillared bones
glistening like wet knives--I can count the hundred star-eyes.

Before morning seeps from the cracked trees and the view of these woods
is left for blood lines of dawn, I can see you rise from the moon blue
fields of rag weed and feral corn stalks, your crutches like wings.

Is it you who watches for me, who picks the dirt from my feathers? Or,
when hungry dogs gather outside the fence, their meanness sinewed and jaws gleaming with sacrifice, is it you who opens the gate?

It's no coincidence that your nakedness is the word for wolves in moonlight, that you believe cruelty is the first act of grace. Because a chicken can't fly,
you teach it to jump. If the blind complain, you wash their eyes out with lye.

Another dream goes like this: A young woman is furiously sweeping
in a dirt yard trying to erase her pigeon toed tracks, or she is crouching
over the shorn breast of a hen counting teeth marks along the broken neck.

I would like to comfort her, to place my hand on the crooked bough
of her shoulders and feel her breath rustle around the ashen dogwood hearts.
I would like to say that, after time enough, even Argus fell asleep.

How strange then, on nights when you arrive in a high, rat-colored car,

dressed in preacher blues with a hat as wide and sharp as a street corner,
when you hold my own infirm body under water, I always forget to struggle.



59   The Paris-American

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Matthew Zingg's poetry has appeared in The Madison Review, The Awl, Muzzle, Blackbird and Opium Magazine, among others. His criticisms can be read in The Rumpus and forthcoming in The American Reader. Zingg received his MFA from Adelphi University and lives in Brooklyn. Photo was taken by Jillian Brall.


   
   Next week's poet:

 Nicholas Aiezza
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