Bunion turned
Habit step
As men
Step vainly into men
We’ll take turns
I’ll be your wife
I’ll fill
With your fingertips resting
In the tone echo that stays
Delusional
Seeping through an actual life
Demure or sumptuous
Having cast ahead the bolt of words
Long before we hoped
To arrive and plunder
Weren’t our bodies already draped in it
Frenzied, real?
The rind of your heel
Tucked into my eye
I want its share of patio
Cement, patio dust
The underworld you think
Happens far from you
Wait there to be lit
In the moon’s fulfilling glow
The company’s orphaned satellite
Each in their tolerances
Entomb calculations, material
Properties from which we say
We’ll make a better world
Like canned food
Preserves a dog’s future vomit
It’s okay
We came hungry
We came to love
A penitent love
We came to deny it
Self-same master
Self-same light
Farid Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine Editions, 2010), The Real Horse (University of Arizona Press, 2018), and Moon Mirrored Indivisible (University of Chicago Press, 2025). With artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, Matuk created the book-arts project Redolent, recipient of the 2023 Anna Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Matuk is also the translator of Tilsa Otta’s selected poems, The Hormone of Darkness (Graywolf Press, 2024). Matuk’s work has been supported by the Headlands Center for the Arts, a Holloway Lectureship in the Practice of Poetry at UC Berkeley, and a 2024 USA Fellowship.
