Matthue Roth

Matthue Roth is the author, most recently, of Candy in Action, a road-trip kung-fu musical coming-of-age novel about a girl who's being stalked and then turns the tables. He has toured with his poetry in America, Australia and Europe, and will be doing his first national tour of Israel in October. He has a secret diary at www.matthue.com.

The following works are copyright © 2008. All rights reserved. No distribution or reprinting in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

  

The Owls Are Not What They Seem

1.
Come, let us sing.

2.
I remember when campfire stories were made for campfires. The natural curve of our faces, silhouetted, not by the red or yellow of a traffic light at night, playing in traffic, but by that crackling crystal orange of a natural fire, roaring as it ate up wood. We played acoustic guitars and watched the burning logs, ripped twigs from them and whittled them into talismans, carving out fine lines, sculpting veins of the wood into Indian faces. The songs we sang around campfires were Indian, too, the culture we were borrowing, trying to adopt. Telling tales of simple sons and double-crossing daughters, good versus evil and nature versus nurture, the oldest stories in the book. The ones that never end. Waiting for the moment when the stories left our bodies, entered the ears of everyone else, became canon.
concrete. unchangeable.

3.
Once the music leaves your head, it's already compromised.

Later, we moved away from those small-town homegrown groves. As we grew apart, grew up, Sonic Youth lyrics replaced Bible verses as a code of law. We eschewed our parents, crafted secrets to keep from them, started on the drugs that they once tried to hide from their parents. Boy Scout uniforms gave way to uniform nose piercings, campfires to the barely-lit basements of punk shows. What scared America made us comfortable.

4.
And yet.

What scared us most was still America.

5.
Plaid lumberjack shirts, Bruce Springsteen tapes, cheerleaders with secrets. How do you make yourself stop being fluent in a language? in a culture? I wanted to drown out America, ignore every television commercial and skip straight to the story.

You can ignore, but you can't forget.

6.
And, somewhere along the path, America became the main character.

Once the music leaves your head, it's already compromised.

The most popular girl in my class, one day, sprouted wings like breasts and flew away. Her pale skin changed to snow-white feathers.
Her eyes, though, remained the same: coal-black, shiny and deep as marbles, with secrets that glinted inside like the bottom of a well. I was chasing her, asking her to concerts and to dances, hoping each time that the new words I asked would lead to yes. They never did. I gave myself one last chance. I chased her around the corner, out the schoolyard, onto the grass. I saw her turn around.

She gave me one last glance. A single, shy look that lingered over her shoulder, even when she was gone.

And then she flew away-Nesting. Nurturing. Nocturnal. She lived somewhere else, now. Somewhere that I could never get back to.

7.
The owls are not what they seem. Nothing is, really.

Now I know.

  

Long Distance Belly

I miss my belly. Not MY belly, you see, but Itta's, Itta being my wife, and her belly being this bouncing ball of a belly that keeps getting bigger-bigger and bigger and one day it's all gonna fall out, one day soon, but hopefully not before I get back. "You did this," she tells me, "you did this," the playful accusation of intolerance, and physically or scientifically or, really, literally speaking I did do it, I filled up her..well, you know with you know, and it's not like this is unexpected but words, when flung out, do have a tendency to take on a life of their own, and life, when flung out with the same ne'er-do-well air of anything-could-happen-ness, does the same. I have a wish, a secret wish, to make my kid in my own image, just like G*d in the Torah, and keep it close to me, play it punk-rock records and alien sci-fi TV shows, so this hypothetical gets molded right-no Bush voters or Barney-obsessed capitalism, here! But my kid-to-be will do what it wants, crawling to ideas like a toy train taken off the tracks, and then my job will be only to watch. My only prayer is this: let me always remain interested, always on the edge of my seat.

  

Mold

When Noah prayed
You sent him a flood
and charged him with the safety
of all animal life.

What I got was rain.
I forgot to wash my shirt
so it grew mold.

In every generation
the holy men we have
stand on different levels.
We all get the hero
we deserve.

On behalf of mold
-and on behalf of my wife,
who loves when I do laundry-
I will try
to be worthy.