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by Matt Mitchell after "Chum" by Earl Sweatshirt once, under the belly of a night tinted with a hue of february cold, vince carter, blanketed by an atlanta hawks jersey, flew in on a canadian swarm of wind & dunked so death-defyingly over kevin love that my grandmother mistook vince’s red streak of a body for that of a cardinal & asked me why her dead husband was on her television set. my grandmother, hands of leather pressed with cemetery dirt, planted marigolds & left orange marbles in the wet soil guarding her husband’s grave, carried his voice to the dinner table & jammed it down my throat as a sacrifice to god so she could eat a blessed meal. she told me to drive by graves & honk the horn to let our loved ones know we were okay. she choked down an apoe gene drizzled onto her potatoes & applesauce & sculpted whatever was left of her husband’s skeletal face in her hands onto my cheeks. a cardinal crashed into my windshield while i was driving down the road her house was crumbling on. its feathers left lakes of red in the cracks of the wipers. i shoveled all of its cartilage off the frozen tar & into my mouth, swished them in-between my teeth, & spit them all out into the shape of resurrection. i drive by my grandfather’s grave & forget to honk. i refuse the invitation to let god swim in the open channel of my tired mouth. there was no red streak on her television, only the reflection of my emaciated body across the black glass. the cataracts permeating in her eyes, mistaking this skeleton for heaven. she once told me a cardinal didn’t mean shit if our dead ancestors had no desire to visit us.  Matt Mitchell is a writer from Ohio. His work appears in, or is forthcoming to, venues like The Boiler, NPR, Frontier, Vagabond City, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and Homology Lit, among others. He is the creator of A Galaxy of Mail-Ordered Chaos, a series of essays on the NBA and hip-hop. |