Matt Sumpter: Man Fasting at Coos Bay
I watch cranes pierce the tide,
the clam-holes gasping as water
exits them. Hunger, the opposite
of dreams, affirms the thing you are.
I remember women lying beneath me
in the fescue behind my parents’ house,
my sweat bruising their clothes.
When mom and dad divorced again,
my brother doused the field
with gas, and I lit it as a wind kicked up,
and we cheered the fire toward
the house, feeding it our clothes
until the flames all simpered, dying,
so we scuffed back inside to sleep.
Now, craving works in me. The wind
strips leaves from an alder
it can’t kill. Past these hungers,
there is calm, like a warm
and flameless stove, that I can’t reach.
Far off, a motorboat rides low in water.
Two men sit cross-armed,
their fishing lines tightened by the current
like piano wires, but no sound comes.
They’ve worked for silence their whole lives.
The outboard motor of the boat
starts up, sending concentric ripples
like a sonar pulse. There is no message,
though I ache for one as traffic
on the nearby frontage road aches,
searching for the bridge to Reedsport.
MATT SUMPTER’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as The New Yorker, The New Republic, Boulevard, 32 Poems, The Cincinnati Review, and River Styx, and has won the Crab Orchard Review Special Issues Feature Award. He received his MFA at The Ohio State University and is currently a PhD student in creative writing at Binghamton University.
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