Letters to My Would Be
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Letters to My Would Be
Dear ________,Mostly all of them come true. In one dream, a handful of crumbs caston the water. Instead of slow float, they were engulfed by fire. WhenI awoke, she asked if I’d had a nightmare, if I liked rivers, if I wantedtoast for breakfast since the bacon cooked down to sticks.
Dear _______,Why would it? Has blood ever stopped anyone?
Dear ________,I don’t know when I knew the degree of my angle. I guess it was whenshe told me to lie down, then crawled on top of me and looked mein my eyes for an entire afternoon. We didn’t go any further that day.But in the nights that followed, I came to fully understand Narcissus.Imagine sitting by that pond, dipping down to kiss your reflection,only to find you are the water and you were very, very thirsty.
Dear ________,Agreed! Circles are my least favorite geometric shape. They seem sounanimated, flat and predictable. If you ask me, Ouroboros is onesorry, spun-out, tail-in-his-mouth son-of-a-bitch.
Dear ________,I meant to tell the truth, over and over. But each time I opened mymouth, the only words: I’ll be home late, again. Can you make dinner?What did you just say? Good, how was your day?
Dear ________,It wasn’t easy for her either. She was in love with two women: a gor-gon and a siren. The siren would plead: Crash at this rock, my Love! Thegorgon would stare her still. Wave and stone. Skipped water pebble.Choices. Hard choices.
Dear ________,Some nights, I would sweetly sing the sailors’ song in the mirror, hop-ing to force myself into the sea. Hush the coming gust, some want. [End Page 317]
Airea D. Matthews, a Cave Canem Fellow, is a 2013 Pushcart Prize nominee and a Zell Postgraduate Poetry Fellow at the University of Michigan, where she earned her MFA in poetry and was awarded the 2011 Michael R. Gutterman Prize. She has also attended the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop in the USA. Her nonfiction prose, poetry, and fiction have appeared in a number of periodicals, including The Baffler, WSQ, Indiana Review, and The Missouri Review. She lives in Detroit.
