The Broadside Project

I recently was asked to participate in Red Bird Chapbook's Broadside Project, which connects artists and writers in a blind collaboration to produce a monthly broadside/poster that is displayed at local Twin Cities gathering spots.

"This is for you"

Cool girl in stovepipe jeans
lighting a smoke at the bus stop,
your back to me,
me remembering
a morning, hot like this,
rising in the dark,
leaving early for work, going
to a job I tried not to hate
after dreaming for the first time ever
in sad-sack black
and white, up so early
I caught the grass unawares,
in the act, the lascivious
blades beneath the evergreen boughs
saying to hell with it, keeping on, spawning
weeds regardless of my presence.
It wasn’t a storybook dawn.
It was rawer than that. More like
a caterpillar turning monarch,
cesarean-cutting
the body of a chrysalis,
birthing perfect orange, perfect green.
I bore witness to it all. I was not
the me I had hoped to be.
“Before ripe turns to rot,” I said, I say,
“open your mouth. Swallow yourself.”
-Matt Mauch