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(Salt) A LOBSTER. Once out of the box The wooden box The metal box The box, the box, the box Dragged up from the salt Things don't feel too bad And then they do And then they don't (And waves)
From 50 American Plays by Matthew Dickman and Michael Dickman. Copyright © 2012 by Matthew Dickman and Michael Dickman. Reprinted with permission of Copper Canyon Press. All rights reserved.
My mother is taking me to the store because it’s hot out and I’m sick and want a popsicle. All the other kids are at school sitting in rows of small desks, looking out the window. She is wearing one of those pantsuits with shoulder pads and carrying a purse with a checkbook. We are holding hands, standing in front of the big automatic doors which silently swing open so we can walk in together, so we can step out of the heat and step into a world of fluorescent light and cool, cool air.
The only precious thing I own, this little espresso
cup. And in it a dark roast all the way
from Honduras, Guatemala, Ethiopia
where coffee was born in the 9th century
getting goat herders high, spinning like dervishes, the white blooms
cresting out of the evergreen plant, Ethiopia
where I almost lived for a moment but
then the rebels surrounded the Capital
so I stayed home. I stayed home and drank
coffee and listened to the radio
and heard how they were getting along. I would walk
for matthew z and matthew r
I remember telling the joke about child molestation and seeing the face of the young man I didn't know well enough turn from something with light inside of it into something like an animal that's had its brain bashed in, something like that, some sky inside him breaking all over the table and the beers. It's amazing, finding out my thoughtlessness has no bounds, is no match for any barbarian, that it runs wild and hard like the Mississippi. No, the Rio Grande. No, the Columbia.