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Matthew Dickman was born in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of the chapbook Amigos, published by Q Ave Press in 2007. The recipient of fellowships from The Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, The Vermont Studio Center, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he lives in Austin, TX. His book of poems All American Poem, winner of the 2008 APR/Honickman Prize, is forthcoming in the fall of 2008 from Copper Canyon Press.
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SHE'S NOT GOING TO CARRY US HOME
I know you won't like this,
because it's coming from me, because I haven't done anything lately
worth ribbins or ovations or glittering bottles
of champagne, because I've stopped
listening to music, stopped reading the books I've told you I'm reading,
because I don't eat
and when I do it's only a bottle of beer or a cigarette
which makes me poor, makes me feel like someone far away
is walking out of a boardroom with my money
stuck to his heel like toilet paper, that I'm in my dark
heaven where I laugh and cry and practice my self-pity like an Olympian,
where I'm king of England and America
but no one knows it, where I don't really talk to black people, not really,
not like I pretend to, where I float above my mattress like the ghost of
Jesus,
his blond hair burning like virgins in Zürich,
pouring their legs into volkswagens and cotton tights with pink elastic
bands,
this place I'm living in, organizing the furniture, selling off the things I love,
making room for nothing, to tell you, Nina Simone is not coming
back, she's not going to carry all her white children home
because there are no children
and there is no home.
-- Matthew Dickman
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