From The Gut Sonnets Take 2: Should I Kill and Eat Chi-Ko or Not, or Alone in Rage the Self Is Split, Lost
- From The Gut Sonnets Take 2: Should I Kill and Eat Chi-Ko or Not, or Alone in Rage the Self Is Split, Lost
No more! I’m sick of living! (ripped like this), torn Like a note that needs both halves for sense. Night after night, I turn in sheets, as if on a spit, am like Hot vinegar back and forth poured between Black pot, black kettle. Should I eat that bitch? But once the thought’s out I again begin to whittle With understanding words the size of the crime To a crumb. Gut, are you monster or mouse?
I am a monstrous mouse. I am both and not Myself. I want Chi-ko to feel it. To make revenge fit, I oughta chop him up in seed-sized bits, plant A toe here, a hand there. I oughta scatter an epitaph Across a hundred tiny tombstones, and then, In time, eat the grass and flowers, like a lamb. [End Page 20]
Matthew Yeager’s poems have appeared in NANOfiction, Sixthfinch, Bat City Review, Supermachine, Gulf Coast, and others as well as in Best American Poetry 2005 and Best American Poetry 2010. His short film “A Big Ball of Foil in a Small NY Apartment” was an official selection at thirteen film festivals in 2009–10, picking up three awards. Other distinctions include the 2009 Barthelme Prize in Short Prose and two MacDowell fellowships. He has been working the last three years on developing and writing a serial television drama tentatively called Savages of the Ohio, a true history of merchant adventuring and land speculation in the 1760s. The son of a coalminer’s daughter, he graduated high school in Cincinnati in 1998 and has lived in New York City since 2002. In 2011, he took over as the cocurator of the KGB Monday Night Poetry series. A book of poetry is forthcoming at some point.
