Two poems by Matt Coonan

The Leaving  

These pockets of my mind reek of mulch

& citronella & the thick flesh of shed flight  

butterfly sliced, fed to bubbling oil  

& the circadian bebop of night churning  

a boxed monster & those Lisa Frank hot pink

flowers with that gorgeous name lost 

somewhere in the dirt or trunk of mom’s SUV.

The rest is blintz & valley folded into my 

amygdala, like Brianna’s paper fortune teller, 

the one that promised a life etched out in shades 

of colored pencil. The Big Bang was an end 

to the nothing, but nothing leaves here to  

remember. Memory is the leaving. It plops out 

dewy with many tangled feet. I teach it to run.

Matt Coonan is a poet, emcee & teacher from New York. He holds an MFA in creative writing and literature from Stony Brook University. He is the author of Toy Gun (Button Poetry, 2023), as well as two chapbooks. His poems have been featured on Button Poetry and published in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Southampton Review, Inklette, among others.