(Editors’ note: We will take the month of August off for miCRo, so this will be the final miCRo post until early September! Happy summer days . . .)
Assistant Editor Michael Alessi: Matt Del Busto’s stunning poems take up age-old questions about how the past shapes us. These are intimate odes, not just to encounters and places earnestly rendered, but to acts of passage measured in years and miles, to the hurt and longing that leave the speakers transformed. Through revelatory line breaks and poignant imagery, Del Busto invites us to pause, reconsider, and unearth new meanings, to locate the sublime and the sacred in the body’s deeper awareness of itself.
Each poem below is accompanied by audio of Del Busto reading the piece:
Boys Will Be
In this version, still
there is kneeling
and a Skittles-stained
tongue. I hold
a question I cannot
ask. You have to
understand, I am four.
He is six. In every
version. Please, believe
my mouth, how fully
I kneel before beginning.
Believe, too, my want
against the laughter
flecked with spittle.
How my grief will grow
to be my want’s central shoot.
For years, I will fear
that from me, nothing
can flower. In this version,
when I take him in,
it is late afternoon
and the sun beats
our backs red
as the pool shimmers
its lazy blue eye.
In every version,
my heart fogs
like grass in the rain.
This time, I hold
the hammer until
I become it.
Pennsylvania Turnpike, heading west
What I-76 wound around was not the fist of frigid earth
or the bored shoulders of mountains, but the very lack of trees,
its plain slate yawn the stretch on which you barreled,
your vehicle’s milky wheels whirring their unholy anthem.
You couldn’t finish a thought with the radio’s cruel insistence
on sound, couldn’t map the squalls’ white waltz, the fog’s thick hands
like an endless callus to pick. It was another trip years ago
when short shrieks of laughter bounced like rain on the interstate
whose number you’ve forgotten, something running
between Terre Haute and Saint Louis, miles of nothing
but horizon and roadkill, the road so arrow-straight
you need not touch the steering wheel for minutes at a time.
You know a man astonished a bridge could ever finish
on the outskirts of his town—My whole life, he says,
was under construction. What else is there to say to someone
waist-deep in wonder? New Morgan, Carlisle, Manns Choice
go by with barely a word. Pennsylvania is an endless forearm,
as emotionless. Its trees like so many hairs curled against the wind.
No one told him life was this cruel, this beautiful.
There are things you’ve learned only once. Above,
the sky continues loosing its harvest as you remember your mother,
born in this state, though she lives now hours west
and is wearing slippers to indicate, no, this winter
has not yet finished. There is something left to say.
Matt Del Busto is a poet from Indiana. He received his MFA from the University of Michigan, where he is currently a Zell Fellow in poetry. He lives with his family near Ann Arbor where he writes, teaches, and spends too much time in the kitchen.
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