Sample Poems by Matt Phillips

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Hometown Roads

High Desert, 2014

Heat-washed pavement unravels
a bottled, landscape melody, folky
percussion through the too-bald tires.
Sawtooth horizons, yellow haze
rises along the eye-limits,
wind-bent stoplights flash rhythms--
green, yellow, red. A scaly lizard scampers
somewhere, brushing indecipherable hieroglyphics
into pastel game trails. Here I am--back again
tapping my escape song against
a vinyl armrest, all the storefronts
the same. It's one more 12-pack and breathless heave
into starlight, a deep-hued darkness lingers over
these ridges, an omen. Turn back. I tell myself
I will. But this road, I've memorized
each groove. I'd be tapping beats
until a distant drawbridge. It'd wheel
onto melodious highway--out and about.
Or, it'd pendulum back like a carousel does,
slinging arcs into yesterday, a metronome
holding time for all those hometown legends, once
-loved cliches like me on endless, circular repeat.

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Wolf Sighting

Through a cracked windshield: trotting
wolf against gray morning--my thoughts
caught in a cold-throat place.
The moons of wolf hips shiver, tear-drop
swimmings in lodgepole pines. I blink--
it's gone, wolf-ghost vanished
like conifer scent beneath Utah's
red hoodoos. Oh, Wyoming; a lake
named Jackson--still as Mercury
on a microscope slide--where I try
for silver trout, six hours reeling,
but all I catch are flat reflections
of snow- capped peaks and narrow echoes
--or silence lured by sunlight.

On the boat ramp
three park rangers dislodge a creaking dock,
tug it toward shore with yellow tethers
to a pickup--I watch the trees behind me,
squint through shadows, rig a spinner

while the dead-bolt weight of bear spray

hinges on my hip.

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For Lack of Sound

Moon lined streets.
Caravan of taxis.
Drivers chew tobacco, eyes
pinned to the hips of women;

predators

on the move, grinning for dinner.
And the sky turns ocean colors--
another city fare.

Electioneers cry wolf
at council meetings,
pin signs to chainlink fences
outside elementary schools.

I promised myself:
No more apocalypse poems.
Not while a city folds
in origami reversal--

    steel girders
    crushed cement.

Dogs will run
in packs; our losses
replaying like minor chords
through a police bullhorn.

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San Ysidro

My father's sins drove me to this land--his mistakes were many: [1] A knife fight
in the dusty streets of La Paz where he lay with a punctured lung (beneath
the Hotel Yeneka, a hideaway for Subcomandante Marcos). [2] An orca poacher's life
in Bahia California's crystal waters. [Three] days in a county jail near Riverside.
[4] My teenage mother coaxed from the pastel walls in my grandfather's hacienda
near Mulege--this was the last.        I tell myself

this story many times: Covered in engine grease and sweat, my mother slid
between broken floor tiles in a Tijuana nail salon. Shaking in a beige house dress,
she lit a torch and groped forward, veered into a mouthless dark. How,
when a skinny white man with seventy years lifted a metal grate, she fell
against him and wept. How, three months later, I was born in this city--

namesake to a saint--

and my mother died, a widow at my birth. Other boys, like me, lost their fathers
to the desert. I have heard this story
        many times: how, dry- tongued, a man collapsed into hot sands
when he could not find a tunnel.

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Gabriel's Praise

Johnny Cash/sings weird melodies
Jazz/has a heartbeat
Porsche/cuz I scored an old white one off some dude from Port Hueneme
Menudo/nothing like it for the hangover, hermano
County Line/ I come out here at five-in-the-AM, smoke a joint, body board--
    nothing like a wave when you're on drugs.

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Work History

Bartender's malaise in my mid-twenties; I smothered

fruit flies with cocktail napkins. Sitting at a trolley stop
near Little Italy, thinking about City College--graffiti
scrawled like Arabic on the sidewalk--I watched sailboats
skirt the embarcadero, tourists pry bubble gum from palm
tree sandals. Try getting into Bar Dynamite in black Dickies
and steel-toed boots, your hands rotting with sanitizer, tequila
and sweet & sour mix. Wait in a long line with Shane for Air
Conditioned Lounge, pop tall Budweiser cans and grin as
bouncers deny you entry. You think you want to make a life
for yourself, but you find lines and doors, scrawled messages
on the street--you find null paychecks and happy hour, coffee
shops on your off-days. Give me Lorca and thin mint cigarettes,
give me salt lips, a yellowtail taco on Washington--

humble wants in this city, its lopsided and too few bridges.