"PEANUT JARS" 28/30

The table came from my grandfather’s attic
My mother decided that a young man would need a table somewhere
in their college education.
So she saved it in the back of the garage for many years.
The table in question was made of some type of wood.
I decided at that young age to never become well versed
in the type of woods in the world.
There were plenty of opportunities in life to take Plant Biology classes or show-off to the vegans that I knew what type of Acer Saccharinum
we were sitting under.  So I let it remain a mystery, because nothing else
was really a mystery anymore.

Until one day my grandfathers table broke.

I found myself a mess. It was liberating.
I thought of my childhood— the way the world seemed to forever open up before me and come crashing down in a whirlwind of adult life.
But it wasn’t adulthood that held me down or crushed my dreams.
It was my grandfather’s table.
And there it lay.
Collapsed.
Marble splattered and split down the middle
and like layers of rock a fault line born.
I became seven again, exploring those vast ripples of nothingness and backyard jungles of my next door neighbors gardens.
I look inside the fault line and I find an odd someone there.
It is myself.
I am to blame.
But I bury that thought in the backyard with the kittens whose mother could not reach them, to warm them on that deep winter morning.
I am those tiny mews, miles beneath the surface.
I am the kitten that didn’t make it to the mother for milk. 

It was strange to think that a table carried the weight
of all my work, and like jars
still had the lid screwed on.

-sonja lynn mata

"I NEED MY WOMEN TO BE WARRIORS" 27/30

I need my women to be warriors.
I need my women to stop expecting
that rape culture will somehow end by teaching
young boys and girls that it's wrong to
touch in places when someone speaks "no." That
rape culture will somehow end by saying "Rape culture
is bullshit," on their Tumblrs and spaghetti strapped tank-tops.
That rape culture will somehow end by thinking
that men are the ones who need the education about it.
I need my women to point fingers and name names.
I need my women to press charges.
I need my women to go to court and share their stories.
I need my women to suffer just a tad bit longer in the public eye.
I need my women to have names and faces, not just statistics for
whatever fucking survey is the flavor of the month.
I need my women to stop waiting for Hillary Clinton or who the fuck ever
to do something about "it" or something "for them" or something for "the cause."
I need my women to stop saying "I'm not a feminist but. . . "
I need my women to believe that the woman they are waiting for is themselves.
I want my women to believe that it would take
greater courage deep down inside for a soul to gain redemption rather
than believe all rapists should rot in hell for eternity.
I need my women to be warriors, otherwise
I might as well remain silent
by tattooing my attackers name
on the the inside of my bottom lip so
that my clenched teeth dare not utter
the echo of their name.

-sonja lynn mata

26/30

The Sirens of Titan lay open
on pages 220 and 221.
I am stealing the words
strung together
by Kurt Vonnegut.
Between Mars and Mercury
a man named Unk
turns forty-three years old.
He had every reason to wither and die.
That's as far as this
poem goes. So it goes.

-sonja lynn mata

25/30

I rub away clumps of eye-liner from below my lashes with the palm of my hand
and try to shake off the smell of everything still left in your house.
Your home in the Midwest, the one your father left for you on the edge of the bayou.
The one that has remained a burden on your conscience.
You are twenty-seven, a boy stuffed into the skin of a man.
A boy stuffed into the home of a sick man.

Your father, a hoarder of stuffing, has taken its toll on
the home on the edge of the bayou.
You remain standing on the crooked porch, stroking the oxidized brass numbers five and nine.
It is there that I realize that there are moments and moments
stuffed deep down inside of you, a denial that in a few short years the bayou will swell.
It will come to swallow the house whole, leaving you nothing, but the stuffings
of a boy still wondering what to do about the stuffings of a sick man.

-sonja lynn mata

24/30

"We started this last summer"

are the words my mother mutters
to herself
as she kneels down
on the pathway leading
to the front door.
I know the routine and brace
myself by putting the grocery bags
on top of the washing machine.
Without a mind, my mother claws her fingers
into the garden under the hard earth
in order to reach
beneath each flowers stem.
But this time it is much more forceful.

"Remember? We started this last summer"

are the words my mother shouts
to the clumps of dirt and flower buds around her.
This is not like every summer.
Where we go through the same routine of
moving every.single.fucking.flower from
right to left, left to right.

"We started this last summer"

are the words my mother
no longer knows how to speak
for she is sobbing around herself.
I reach out and stroke the disappearing hairs
by her forehead. Her hair is still long,
just a little bit thinner
than last summer.

-sonja lynn mata

 

23/30

You were named after a professor that studied plants.
& you got all awkward when you told me so.
So I had to do you one better
& tell you
that my name
phonetically
starts
like a tea kettles water
just beginning to boil.
It releases down the esophagus
to create a huge void that is filled
with shaded openness.
It picks back up
with the tongue
calling
its desires forward.
Even though it will never be enough.
My name ends with a slam
of exhaled breath.
It is an endless resonance
that travels beyond the
knowings of time and space.

-sonja lynn mata

22/30

It is day 22,
and I am listening
to my roommates
having sex. The way she moans
reminds me of a breeze
rolling across three small hills.
How if I were to stand on those hills
each gentle breeze would grace
my shaking back and push me
forward ever so slightly.
My fists unclenching
as I fall backwards into
tall wildflower grasses.
In worm-eye view I’d
see underneath the flowers face.
What lies below is an interstate
of small creatures changing lanes
and grasshoppers leaping from
petal to petal.
But it is all kind of sad somehow— for
I have found myself swimming
in the intimate knowledge
that is shared between
two beings. I begin
to retract, like a bug wanting
to be gone forever, under my covers.
There is only my hot breath
bouncing back to dry my wet eyes.

-sonja lynn mata

21/30

"I am sorry, but tonights poem is only available for my indiegogo funders, Couchsurfing hosts, friends, and family. For those people "21/30" (actually titled under another name) will come to you in the mail within the week. "21/30" will be made available to the public once it has reached its intended audience first. Thank you for your understanding."

-SONJA LYNN MATA (jerk!)

20/30

Your name started with a B.
How it matched with the gap
in-between your teeth.
An auctioneers niece, we had it big
that summer in Ohio.
The cows broke out that first week.
The stare-down between you,
holding that bucket of feed
and the bandit cows quest for sustenance
broke so quickly that
I never saw rain-boot ankles
jump over a fence so fast.
That cow so happy to drive
its wet nose into the earth
we spent hours developing
operation "No. You hold the bucket
and I'll open the gate.
How the task became so great
we ended up calling the sheriff
for help. I remember that
we'd spend every break
on that abandon trampoline.
How the many more times
we'd escape to a small of grove of trees
and cry together as each auction ended.

- sonja lynn mata

19/30

On Moonstone Beach
behind whale rocks
is a man
holding a cage full of small birds.
One by one he releases them with care.
Wings expand into a brief soar of flight. Yet,
instead of pull the man howls pigeon.
A soft squawk and perhaps tiny feathers
pluck away
as each bird,
one by one,
land with a soft thud on the sands of Moonstone Beach.

-sonja lynn mata

18/30

(ACT)OR. . .
realize the glory
that we are poets and
clowns pretending
in an imaginary realm.
A vessel bound by ease
and effervescence. Momentum
in our stillness, we propel forward
into the abyss. Howling wildly
into the unknown with our
pants around our ankles. Our own tears
mean almost nothing. We shit a lot
and hold fist-fulls of duende. We
cultivate not knowingness as
we become the last magic
the world will ever know.

-sonja lynn mata

17/30

On the Mattole River
lies Whitethorn. A vast
127 acres of king-sized
hills. All rolling and open.
One particular hill
grows a five-leafed medicine.
Some claim that is where the heart
of the universe is buried.
But, to me,
it's just a labyrinth of
bat guano and wasp nests.
Whitethorn is a lie, because
no Goddess would ever
place her soul
in that concoction and expect
to be
clipped,
trimmed,
dried,
weighed,
sealed,
shipped,
plucked,
grinded,
rolled,
licked by fingers,
only to be passed from
mouth to mouth
all the while
burning away
silently and slowly.



-sonja lynn mata

16/30

In P.O Box 128
I found a letter postmarked
from the best area code.
Inside the letter were details
of a time sometime soon.
Sooner
if I wanted to leave right
now. And beyond the letter
was a master cassette type
of your band
back in that shitty college town.
A nostalgic something,
because I always was fan.
But just yesterday
I sold my 1995 Subaru.
The only place
with a cassette player in my possession.
The only vessel
for my means to return to a time sometime soon,
but now
is far away.


-sonja lynn mata

"BOSTON" 15/30

I use to slide
around naked
in the bathtub
at the age of
three,
four,
five,
six,
seven,
eight, nine, and maybe ten
in the hopes
that I’d get sucked down the
drain.
And the closest thing to Boston I understand
is my momma’s accent.
How she’d wrap me in a warm towel
and sing “Whose that pretty
little baby in the mirror?”
How she left Boston and how my
fathers father left Mexico only to
end up in the middle of the Midwest.
How I headed East first and then more West later.

So when runners are bombed
I only hear, “Whose that pretty
little baby in the mirror?”
How I can only reply with
“That’s me mom, that’s me mom!”
I’m sorry for being that asshole.
I only ever really cared about my
country when I could use it to
my advantage.
I was one of those people
who voted for the first ever
black president.
I was so special then,
because I was apart of something
so much larger than myself.
But runners in Boston
aren’t my mom or a black president, holding me
through all those years, asking
“Whose that pretty little baby
in the mirror?” 
Only how my country programs
responses of “That’s me mom,
that’s me mom!” It’s all about me,
mom.

-sonja lynn mata

14/30

Accept the mystery
that we dream in watercolors.
Vast pigments
of tombstones
facing against the sun
near abandoned
tuberculosis wards we
explode in false
lamp light.
 
A dab of soggy words
falling from mouths
cascade a truth
where
we can only grasp at
the capital letter places.
Blue Lake sounding the nicest.
Our fears  carved on the
oldest Redwoods
we can find past
no trespassing signs.

I have only a toe
in the waters of
what I understand.

-sonja lynn mata

13/30

The sides of coated bodies split apart.
A street artist bursts forth with
portraits of pastel celebrities and
sketched consumers
who did not, could not, want to foot the
couple of dollars for this real street art.
With large clown eyebrows, clown smiles and
clown teeth I was beginning to wonder
why the world was seen this way. Such large
foreheads would have certainly screened a big
enough flashing marquee of something
really witty, really poetic and really just-that-thing-
that-makes-you-go-ahhhhh buuurrrnnnned you. Right?
But it’s really a burn against humanity.
He caught me on a day where I gave up
and gave in
just long enough to listen to him spinning
all the necessary shit jargon.
A sales pitch to preserve a moment at intersections.
Before I could realize the scale of the distance between easel and chair
he managed to capture a sucker
in a tight denim number and like some
ring master howled “Behold! Behold! Behold!”
With pastels in all the folds of his fingers he
spun vehemently to view his sucker in the tight denim number.
Yet, in all his beholding
the pastels flew out of his hand. A pastel flew right into the
crook of my elbow. The white one too.
He chuckled at his own antics and asked for the pastel back.
White he said was the most important,
because it highlighted all the dark that could not be seen. But
I didn’t want to return to him his pastel. I wanted him
to suffer a real humiliation. A real struggle to fight
for his so-called street art. I must have said something
about the color black, because he returned to the easel
without his white.
In silence he began with vast quick strokes. A near
knowable face formed and the sucker in the tight denim number
had already left. The man wielding
pastels didn’t even notice. He finished by ripping the
large notepad like paper off the board and holding it
in front of my face.
A face to my likeness was staring back at me. But staring
upward and slightly to the left. Huge jewels or flattened kisses
seemed as if they were falling from the whites of my eyes. These droplets
somehow collected at the bottom of the page and were rising. My near
likeness of a mouth began to suffer for breath.
With a crowd gathering and a hard grip
he took back the white pastel and left
the drowning portrait at my feet.
He said, “This is what you won’t do, but maybe
it’s what you need to do. Not me. Not at this intersection.
Not on this day.” He scratched his chin
and returned to his easel shouting
to every passerby “Behold! Behold! Behold!” -sonja lynn mata

12/30

I'm sorry that I am one of those assholes
that went looking for the fence that Matthew
was strung up like a puppet on.

I heard that if I found that fence that
I would see the horizon just a little bit differently. More
blueberry than cloudy and more cloudy than blueberry.
Bits of wire or rope were rumored to remain in pieces and in knots.
You just had to look a little beyond the lithosphere.
For the earth still remembered the hair pulls, the bitch slaps, and
the first bone cracking.

I tried telling the officers that I was just a kid
from a Mid-West state with no coast to represent or
call my own.
That I knew no Matthews. Only that I knew other small kids
who got teased like Matthews
for mixing and matching their orientations.

But to them I was an outsider who ventured
too far into peoples fears and neighborhood. Yet, I
understood the spookiness of seeing through bent blinds
and cracked curtains
a kid stepping out of an idling 95' Subaru
with Mid-Western plates holding a camera in hand just gawking
at the near blueberry cloudy horizon.

I didn't realize until much later on I-80
that I was apart of the reason why kids like Matthew,
the towns that they indwell will
never heal and how the horizon
looks just a little bit less blueberry today.

-sonja lynn mata

11/30

You’ll step in dog shit in this town,
but you’ll learn to just leave it there.
It’s all a part of fitting in. In a town where
farmers markets are totally not frowned upon— just
the type of bag you use. From farm to farm a really
nice, still red, bell pepper will only cost four bucks. No one
will tell you to watch out for the fluctuating prices on garlic.
Owning an umbrella will be your biggest commodity though.
Hippies and gypsies in this town don’t own umbrellas. It all just
pisses me off, because instead of umbrellas they have
skinny dogs who still manage to
shit on sidewalks. I guess I have Redwoods to look at
from time to time while I’m not stepping in dog shit. But
when I do step my clogs in dog shit I’m always running a few minutes late.
It just makes a whole lot more sense to scrape my foot
on an old growth tree. -sonja lynn mata

10/30

The high-boned
taut-toned
moody ink eyes beauty
is named not-Sofie.

What she really wants
is silence,
or an opening
to musing awhile
on the difference between
scars and tattoos. Searching
for how they trace
along miles and miles
of ether.

Like a pleat in cloth
not-Sofie studies
the defects of structure under
fluorescent lights. Mostly
it is her arm bone. The inner
rotation of that spiral
where
her wrist always cracks.

Fatigued and showing
signs of ruin, of wreckage,
ED has become her best
friend.  In rain checks
and in tense mornings
it is only kind of
difficult to get up
today.

This will never be
nothing new. Without an
image in her soul
the rest
is gibberish. Stung with a warm
injection of tears, all
I could do was stare
at the scars
on not-Sofies arm.

-sonja lynn mata

9/30

Matt told me

he felt like a piece of his soul
went missing
more than 10 years ago.
I couldn’t help but swoop into a bird’s view of him
lying on the ground in 1999 on that dirt-colored
carpet
sobbing
at the even sadder
bleaker
ceiling.

Matt released into a halo effect.
The ceilings paint job became rings of water,
clouds and long stretches of supernovas.
Every inaccuracy in the ceiling became another shard
of his soul
splintering deep into his ribs
and he couldn’t even grind his teeth anymore to feel
like he was holding onto something,
even
not knowingness.

Matt imagined his tears
like blazing machines 

drilling over a hard dessert-like ground at a rockets speed.
Matt could see the animation of it all.
A canyon
forming from lacrimal papilla to some other
scientific name.
Echoes of the names of people Matt knew. The distance
they covered. The distance Matt would never reach.
The distance that passed,
that even the rumble in his ears became
something peaceful.

I guess I just forgot to put up WANTED posters.
I didn’t understand,
But that’s what Matt said as he shrugged
and continued searching
for the last piece of the puzzle. 

-sonja lynn mata

8/30

Beware of
red noses hiding in your pocket.
Beware of
lips dotted with a splash of white paint.
Beware of
any being that goes out
to ‘create theater.’ Like that alone
means something.
Beware of
slack line tensions and sloped eyebrows.
Beware of
the greatest entities known to earth.
For you are likely to never meet a true one.
Beware of
the clown
standing alone
on stage
wearing nothing more than a long black coat
with uneven sleeves. 

-sonja lynn mata

7/30

I am standing somewhere on the campus of Iowa University remembering all my failures as a sixteen old. I
wanted to be a creative writing major like Jaswinder Bolina, but at sixteen I rejected letters A through F and numbers 1-36. I believed it would be the only defining moment in my life. I preferred playing kick ball though and did nothing, but taunt geese in the middle of fucking winter around Lake Arlington. It would be
Neal's birthday, the pinnacle age, where he smoked his first cigar and I understood nothing about my friends-- only that we became the assholes we always made fun of on Tarkington's playground. I never really liked woodchips, but I stayed for Adam's elephant jokes.
I started calling my mother Linda at sixteen too. There was something always sad about that. I thought I was unconventional in school, because I never took a foreign language and the only AP class I'd ever take was Art with Ms. Silver. I was snarky in her eyes. She was just too sensitive and useless to those bad art students. I had a filing cabinet as a locker then too, but it would be in that hallway, on the way to art class, where I would
fall
in love a green-eyed monster who would later tell me during
our circus break-up I'd always be forgiven because I had a nice ass. I still
remember the very first time he fingered me in his basement. Like fireworks or something ocean-like. I still remember the many more times,
years later. Depending on how you look at it there are either six or seven states that divide us now. With Speed Racer in the background I write letters to him in college, because
I'm still not very over-it. I'll probably never admit it to his face that he's one of my best friends. Not because
I'm scared, but because I'm anxious. It's all kind of stupid anyway. Sometimes I wonder why I ever bothered stopping on the campus of Iowa University taunting geese in front of youths who didn't give a shit what it meant to stand on top of Lake Michigan or roof toasters or dance like dinosaurs at VFW's.

-sonja lynn mata

6/30

She dons the red nose
Whispering two roads diverge.
Where does she go now?

-sonja lynn mata

Dedicated to a fellow ensemble mate here at Dell'Arte. :o)

5/30

I slowly peel back
the Swedish Fish
that is stuck to the side of my face.
Glued with night drool I lift its face first.
A silent hiccup escapes and I continue

lifting past the branding scars of Swedish.
Bones are breaking somewhere. I’m sure of it.

Red and thin the tail refuses to let go.
Bits of baby mustache hair pluck out as the Swedish Fish
begins to lift like plastic
in the palm of my hand
revealing the pores of my cheek bone. I wince
at the thought of how

my pores look like fish scales. Non-rainbow, but grey
somehow. A waxy red film and I find myself in
fish eye. But all I want to see is
the valleys and peaks of places and sometimes
the people there too.

All in a rapid sequence the fish is telling me
something about my mood swings and
why I prefer to touch myself. How it is both hot and cold
in this bed. It tells me why I fall asleep with
Swedish Fish in my bed.

In an even faster moment, none of this matters as
I am already picking at my teeth and reaching for
another Swedish Fish.

-sonja lynn mata

4/30

Yesterday I found a word
that rhymed with orange. But
I’m not going to tell you the
word that rhymes with orange.

You’ll have to guess and count
on all ten fingers, toes too, the word that
rhymes with orange. All I know is

that it is an ancient word. Ancient beyond
Mayans and civilizations before those Mayans. It may
have been my teacher or my neighbor or a movie
that told me that we have forgotten
others words too. We have forgotten the words
that rhyme with the words that we have forgotten.

Or we may have just forgotten
their true meaning— beyond any knowingness. Perhaps
we forgot about the people too. The people who made up those words.
The person who made up the word that rhymes with orange.
Forgot the very details about how to

grow our own food. I didn’t know
where an orange even came from
until the eight grade. I didn’t find them in trees,
but in test tubes and centrifuges.

The word that rhymes with orange sounds heavy.
Squishy sometimes. With a slight leap in the middle.
It sounds slow.
And somehow sad.
But nobody can tell me why oranges come from test tubes.

Yesterday I found a word
that rhymes with orange. But
I’m not going to tell you the
word that rhymes with orange. Because
you’ll just forget.

-sonja lynn mata

"JUST IN CASE" 3/30

Sometimes
I wonder why
my dead brother
has a Facebook page.

How the duffel bag of all his clothes
remain zipped up and zipped away, but not
gone entirely. How the deflated
bicycle still remains in the dilapidated garage.

How the metal fence, where my father pushed
my dead brother onto the metal spikes, has now been
replaced with a wood fence now-- too crusted in sea moss.

At night I sense that there are memories in my spine.
Cerebral happenings where I fall asleep in embryo.
Where I cry in embryo.
Where I gaze at the small webbing’s of my
once frog like hands and remember

only a smaller impale on my brothers left cheek. How
the eye had made it out alive.

In Smalltown, USA
I write “JUST IN CASE” on every library book
I can find. It means something. I’m just not sure what. And
sometimes I wonder why
my dead brother
has a Facebook page.

-sonja lynn mata

2/30

She stole the sound
of my name and fingered it
deep in my throat.

I let out a years worth
of sighs, because I know
that you only showered

to get your hair smelling
like hers did. You still
don’t understand the difference

between scars and tattoos, the
winters of Minnesota, and the history of
your flinches and of your fake-outs that bring
on our make-outs.

I can see that when you look up at me
and ask if you can do your laundry
it is only something unreasonably nostalgic.

But without hesitation I say yes.

After you have gone I check to see
if you had cleaned out the dryer vent. You, like her, had
always forgotten.

As I turn the corner there is that tiny patch
of grey-blue fluff sitting on top of the washing machine.
I bend down to nose level and give one last inhale. It is
the most distant, but deepest scent of you.

-sonja lynn mata

Lake Michigan

We drove to Glencoe Beach
in the middle of fucking winter.
In this rich t.v neighborhood
we parked my ‘95 Subaru infront
of Allstates CEO’s million dollar mansion.

We ran through security cameras,
private fences, and imported sand
in full Chicago snowgear. Only the
duffle bag holding the toaster was
kept hidden.

We stood on top of
Lake Michigan. And like
wild things romped and
howled to the lighthouse
moon.

The police were coming.
We were sure of it. But
vibrating kazoo lips kept
our minds warm. Our bodies
in motion.

Then Bryan’s leg cracked
through the ice.

We were entranced with the idea
of one of us drowning. How not one
of us would plunge in to save the other.

Just our friends body slamming
against the place where water and
ice meet.

Lapping, lapping.

Eventually Nathan found the duffle bag
and chucked the toaster into the great
lake waters. Even in the dark we could see
the still escaping air bubbles of the sinking metal.
We continued to stare at the water at how unlimited
we were not.

-sonja lynn mata

1/30

I Googled what poetry meant today;
because I haven’t been able to open up—
my cereal boxes properly lately.

And when you show me a Polaroid of your cat
sitting on your lap
I can’t help but think how fat
your thighs look in that Patriotic bathing suit.

It’s not that you cry on command,
but that you just feel so deeply. In
every channel. In every void.

You want to be one of those people
you write poetry about.
A tangible collection of just words.

Even though I fell in love with a being.

But even with handfuls of poems
you’ll never forgive me, because I always
gave you the ugliest blankets, ate all the grape-flavored
things, killed your internet pets, and mistook apple juice for
beer and got drunk off concentrate.

I Googled what poetry meant today.

-sonja lynn mata