by: Alexandra Mattraw
The power of Alexandra Mattraw’s poetry comes from its concision and compression. These poems have been whittled down until we are left with nothing but the bones of poetry: word, phrase, intention. While eschewing simple narrative, they resist by recognizing our shame, and perhaps even our complicity: “to admit we/ are the colorless/ problem,” because “ all violence against/ bodies is premeditated/ in violence against/ language.”
1968
I run from the mountain / caught in my throat / my country illusion / turns to pirate / my voice rips / across crowds fuming / streets whelm stories / promised before birth / assassinates
an I / for what
we fight / long grass / sway bottoms of feet / face the sun / unmoving / bloodshot / women and children / grow smaller than / recognition / I chant backwards / from zero I hold
cords / metal
clamp a warm gun / flick happiness in wrists / switch off the brain / through the iris / navy
suits cut / a ditch / mutilate a hillside / to moaning I / watch a flag / click seconds between
person / prison
fires roars from / city windows / run my mouth / to fists punch out / a pig
for office / a sheep needs bullets / a ballot takes a pen / and draws / blood between / tiny bones
shatter / our family tree
with barbs / tunnel each body / bannered with stars / to story what’s
stacked / and flown back / to the mountain we run / for what / for what we /do we
/ gag the night
Remission
wetter in sun-
lifts than what sets
mushroom blooms
in my chest : feet
whisper and splash
: the pulling forth
of genes in remission
you cannot help
becoming aerial
: clean : up-flap
of laughter so in-
voluntary robins
snicker : chime
muddy bark
and spool sage
to know well
how droughts need
awakenings :
a flood
to taste
hours
The issue she said with intersectional resistance is that
after Mario Savio & Solmaz Sharif
to fit in unwanted
kneeling we divide
by teeth : hold
near comical fault
lines with redundant
chant : resist
all violence against
bodies is premeditated
in violence against
language : machines
we create these
: turnstiles : hours
that demand we must
spin : gender : names
arrow to arrow
until union shams
a low blow I
didn’t but should’ve
seen striking gold
from each tower
or flashing dumb
from white pickets :
here are we
leveled : dis-
honest as wheels
that themselves
listen for the cheat
the twist tsk
of rims caught red
in our eyes
too late arrived
to admit we
are the colorless
problem : arrest
the gears write
back parts fall
numberless
into Moloch’s
dynamo
: lit in this
apparatus
word war :
levers
so sick at heart
so passively
: un : free
Alexandra Mattraw is an Oakland poet whose first full length collection of poems, small siren, emerges from Brooklyn’s The Cultural Society in 2018. She is also the author of four chapbooks, including flood psalm, forthcoming this spring from Dancing Girl Press. Her poems, reviews, and interviews have also been featured in places including 1913 Journal of Forms, American Letters & Commentary, The Conversant, Denver Quarterly, Eleven Eleven, Fourteen Hills, The Poetry Project, The Volta, and VOLT. A Bay Area Correspondent School member and former Vermont Studio Center resident, Alexandra curates an art-centric writing and performance series called Lone Glen: http://loneglen.wordpress.com/.
