NORTHEAST OHIO SPOTLIGHT

i want you to feel like this can still be your home

Poetry by ​​Matt Mitchell

after Danez Smith


There’s a shed in a different state. Inside, two
ten-speeds the color of rust. Outside, Grafton
 
boys shooting baskets in the driveway, heaving
the ball at a dirty hoop nailed above the garage
 
door. Them boys, becoming older with every jump.
Them boys, the color of August. Color of family
 
reunion. Boy a distant cousin, his mom family
by marriage. If it was raining, we’d rip
 
our shirts off & dance. Our home is your home,
distant cousin said. Here, I am not dead, but alive.
 
I chase him through the neighborhood on his
bike, yelling his name. He yells mine back, &, for
 
a moment, I forget what it’s like to fear birthplace.
I was a boy born sky blue, molded from The Rascals
 
& Patsy Cline & swing-set metal from the Grafton
Park playground, where a boy made from corduroy
 
leaves & lemons once unpeeled himself from the rumble
seat of his father’s truck & paraded towards me. At
 
the same time, a girl ballerina’d into me, her smile
made of peaches & rhododendrons. Both were
 
beautiful, Appalachian drawls like dances. We all
made a fort under the plastic yellow slide by the
 
monkey bars. They didn’t ask why I didn’t sound
like them, instead grabbing me & twirling my body
 
towards a slit in the tree-line exposing afternoon.
If they both asked for a kiss, I’d have kissed them.
 
If they both asked me to dissolve with them, I’d
have vanished. It was there I felt safe, my last slice
 
of church a playful wrestling match ending in me
screaming uncle by the balance beam, honeysuckle
 
rebirth leaking into the scars on my knees. I was
too scared to cross the jangle bridge, so they
 
each held my hand & carried me to the pool
by the pavilions. What paradise to live in when
 
someone closes your wounds & loves you back, if
only for one day. If I submerged my head under
 
the water, my ears wouldn’t plug, but instead I’d
hear songs & gods puckering their lips, twisting their
 
mouths into piano notes. Junior high boys flocked
to the pool, the thick heat pushing them off the
 
ledge into the cool deep end. The crescendo a gospel
they sang while dunking each other, letting their
 
responsibilities vanish underneath melted ice cream
glued to their cheeks. I asked one of the boys to
 
catch me when I jumped. He broadened his shoulders
& stuck his arms out, & I grew wings & hurled
 
myself beyond him, but somehow his fingers turned
into lifeboats & grabbed me, chlorine ringing in my
 
nose, & pulled me to shallow water. His name a name
hiding in my mouth. His name the same as the RA
 
in the dorm the next building over, who would go
down on me & finish with I’m going to regret that
 
before turning himself blue & disappearing, walking
through December snow without leaving a single
 
footprint. So I call him Morgantown boy. My mouth my
worst enemy, blessed by gapped-teeth, but betrayed by
 
the reliquary beneath my tongue unable to hold onto
a memory’s taste long enough to keep anyone from
 
leaving. I never learned how to swim, so I held onto
the cement ledge tracing every edge of the water,
 
shimmying towards the team of boys strafing each
other in the deep end with cannonballs, their faces
 
painted like no vacancy signs, my heaven a blonde-haired
anybody. Imagine wanting to live in someone else’s
 
mouth & build an entire city in-between their teeth &
feel whole every summer forever & not be able to.

Matt Mitchell

Matt Mitchell is a writer and 1980’s horror movie fan from Warren, Ohio trying to make his work as beautiful as “Head Over Heels” by Tears For Fears. He is a member of the Northeast Ohio poetry group Sad Kids Superhero Collective and is the worst NBA 2K player on the planet. His work appears in, or is forthcoming to, places like Glass: A Journal of Poetry, BARNHOUSE, Turnpike Magazine, and Homology Lit, among others.