FOUR SWITCHES

1. VENT

I can feel the Christ inside me with his side cut open

so he can breathe like a fish

like someone who has been choking on a small bone, maybe

a tiny part of another animal’s vertebrae,

when a friend grabs him from behind, forces

him to lunge, the bone flying out into the restaurant’s candlelight.

And I feel like I am inhaling for the first time all day, a wind

from some mountain or the mouth

of a woman in boys underwear and blue lipstick

who has been chewing Wintergreen gum or smoking a menthol

exhales into my chest, slides her thigh along my ribs, oh

I can feel the Christ inside me shutter

and then sigh, the heaviness of his lungs let free like ripping

the Duct Tape off your lovers mouth

and pulling the soaked

handkerchief from the back of her throat in one long wet movement.

2. LIGHT

When you slap me hard across the face

there’s a lightning field of joy that hits the two thousand points

of my body’s galaxy

and makes me think of the powerful bodies

horses have. It’s amazing how far a single molecule of the sun

has traveled just to slip across your finger,

your lower lip, the three freckles below your left breast. It means

so much that you would take one of my hands

and put it around your throat

while you hold the other one down onto the white pillow

with every muscle you have left, and that you would turn your head

up to the ceiling fan and open your mouth

toward the light bulb which must be, by now,

turning into a cloud, spinning like a top made out of milky blue china.

3. HEAT

I remember the sound you made the first time

my hand was inside you

and how that sound became deeper like a dark color

at the palm and how it finally rang

like a clear piece of glass at the wrist, the beads of sweat

beginning to drip from your forehead, your ears, until the room

took on a shade of bright yellow

somehow in the dark. I can hear it now. I can feel the vibrations

coming off your chest like flags

of electricity and how you would start like someone in a fight

but in the end, curled up

in the damp sheets, every inch of your body

was like a pool of warm water

that had been thrown onto the tile floor of an elaborate

dinning room, and how you would run a bath so that, stepping

into it, you almost sounded the same, a sharp pain

that made your teeth grind, the water so hot

that every part of your body that touched it was like Mars turning red.

4. NIGHT LIGHT

The whole house frozen like a glacier but for the ghost

our clothes make in the corner of the room

as if they can still remember what it was like to be taken off,

still humming, almost warm. The moon

in the window and the sky

part cotton field and part obsidian, the kitchen towel we used, full of ice,

melting onto the hardwood floor. There is nothing

in the sky better than you. Nothing on earth that feels better

than the ribbon you took out of your hair

and tied around my wrists. Your eyes closed. Your chest rising

and falling like snow

in the windy dark, your mouth a little swollen, the blood in your lips

filling them back up, your arms above your head,

a little spit in the corner of your mouth, the things I love about you,

your legs kicking a bit when you dream, your ugly pajamas, your beautiful name.

Above image by Nicholas Lorden

Matthew Dickman is the author of All-American Poem (APR/Copper Canyon Press 2008). He is the recipient of the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, The Kate Tufts Award, the May Sarton Award from The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the 2009 Oregon Book Award. His work has appeared in Tin House, The New Yorker, and McSweeneys, among others. He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.