p r e v i o u s   |   n e x t

Matt Quinn

Flatfish

I was on my back in a swollen creek,
refrigerated and put to sleep, dropping out of time,

just breath assuaging its own battery
into the morphinesweet unreality of the everyday.

Change is a thing one sleeps through.
I can feel myself slipping away, fading away, withdrawing,

this hard loneliness, skull-solid, pushed back into vagueness,
a dome or a canal from any point in space,

cut pink flowers hung in red water.
On the other side of this swamp of dark water, a plane will crash.

I see white pelicans.
White clouds bite down on them like teeth.

 


Source & Method

A cento, this poem uses one complete line from each of the first twelve poems in the Poetry Foundation website’s online collection, “Poems of Sickness Illness and Recovery” These are, in order of their appearance here: “Sickness” by James Langas; “Sense of Time” by George Bowering; “Diagnosis” by Meena Alexander; “The Following Scan Will Last Four Minutes” by Lieke Marsman; “After the Diagnosis” by Christian Wiman; “A Poem about Pain” by David Budbill; “The Moon and the Yew Tree” by Tory Dent; “Sick Room” by Billy Collins; “It’s going to hurt” by Sandra Simonds; “The Rest” by Jane Huffman; “After His Diagnosis” by Margaret Hasse; “Cusped Prognosis” by Laurie Clements Lambeth


Matt Quinn lives in Brighton, England, where he takes frequent rests and sometimes wishes he didn’t have to. His poems can be found online at The Morning Star, Rattle, The Deaf Poets Society, The New Verse News, and elsewhere.


p r e v i o u s   |   n e x t

Issue 27
p r e v i o u s   |   n e x t

Matt Quinn

My 1930s house

I grew the house I live in in 1936.
My family wouldn’t live up to my expectations,

so every weekend from the age of seven or eight
I would go back in time with a carving knife

and cut the floorboards. I was rich
and able to buy all sorts of weird things:

gramophones, gas mantles, electric toasters,
Bakelite hairdryers. I had an obsession with work

and watching Netflix. I restored old food.
I had a postman come to the house once,

but that’s it. The letters were quite upsetting to read.
Kids used to call it the witch’s house.

I get it. It looks well over 100,
like an old lady’s house that died.

When I leave the house I like to pretend
I’m back in the real world.


Source & Method

Collaged/recombined from phrases and parts of phrases taken from
a Guardian newspaper article, “Modern life is rubbish! The people
whose homes are portals to the past” by Sirin Kale, published 12 Jan
2021; all text in the poem taken from the first section, “1930s: Aaron
Whiteside, 38, stained glass restorer, Blackpool.”


Matt Quinn lives in Brighton, England, where he takes frequent rests and sometimes wishes he didn’t have to. His poems can be found online at The Morning Star, Rattle, The Deaf Poets Society, The New Verse News, and elsewhere.


p r e v i o u s   |   n e x t

Issue 27