ARVIN

In a ramshackle structure –
four walls, a roof, and not
a good deal much else –

I am watching a cockroach –
orange as a sunset, antennae flailing
with motion like the lungs

of a screaming child –
scurry across the bare floor.
There is a man speaking

in slow words like a melting glacier,
but I don’t hear him anymore.
Outside are hills, beautiful

and golden, folded like cake batter
above endless rows of fruit trees,
if only you could see through the smog.

 

 

 

 

 

MILK & HONEY

A suffocating cloud of locusts,
they swarmed across the desert,
buzzing like a chainsaw, like static

in a holy transmission. Forty years
of plague, and by the end of it,
only barren trees, fields of brown,

unkept promises, fractured tablets.
So they stayed on the move, leeching
the juice of every ripe fruit tree,

ripping up crops like a hurricane.
Yet the hunger remains, and even today
you can seem them on the horizon

like an impending storm, coming
to raid our towns, to ravage the milk
and honey stacked like totem poles

on grocery store shelves, to reclaim
them from heathens with no dust
streaked on their faces like warpaint,

no stone-hardened calluses on their feet.
When we die and return to the dirt,
placed peacefully in our eternal beds,

they will continue to roam as one
hurtling mass, trampling our graves,
their million feet pounding like drum.

 

 

 

 

 

WILDLIFE REFUGE IN SPRING

Take off your rose-colored glasses for just a moment. This is not Eden. This is not a Disney kingdom where animals nestle up against one another and harmonize while they help a princess into her ballgown. This is the red light district. The chorus of song you hear is an orgy of catcalls, the seductive negotiations of women leaning into car windows, the lewd demands of desperate men. Every fluorescent-feathered breast is a flash of skin. Every shake of the tail is a striptease. Every spread of the wings is a demonstration of prowess. And every stirring bush and tree limb rocks to the rhythm of consummation, to the motion of bird calls coming to fruition. Like you, they have come here for only one thing, but it is not to escape from the lusts that burn like an ever-warming sun, that stretch and lengthen like the hours of daylight, and it is not to somehow find peace in the wintry façade of solitude, that hand inching ever closer to the groin.

Matthew J. Andrews is a private investigator and writer who lives in Modesto, California. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Orange Blossom Review, Funicular Magazine, Red Rock Review, Sojourners, Amethyst Review, Kissing Dynamite, and Deep Wild Journal, among others. He can be contacted at matthewjandrews.com