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