Assistant Editor Michael Alessi: Mattison’s poem mixes personal narrative with Biblical imagery and events, from serpents and furious angels to baptism and resurrection, diving into the uncomfortable contradictions between a child’s experience and a parent’s account. I admire how this poem calls our attention to the human hands that both save and hurt us, shaping our stories, and the bruises they can leave.
To hear Lucian read the poem, click below:
Drowned
It was the year I learned about killer bees; my brother plucked and ate
blades of grass next to the pool, amoeba where Abuelo would wade in turquoise,
pulling dead snakes with his bare hands from the bottom like bullwhip kelp.
Mother on the landline, long-distance with her mother, her hand
stretched the beige tight coiled cord from the wall. In winter clothes, I lost
footing along the rim. Weighed down by pounds of wet fabric,
chlorinated panic in the throat, I crumpled at the bottom of the icy pool
for eight minutes just to wake in a world painted by hospital—for days,
a plucked white chrysanthemum head, my insides a cistern pumped out—
limp reptile, four-year-old ribs bruised from mother’s pounding on my chest.
It was days of family praying for brain activity. Then, years seated next to weeping
mother. I memorized the story’s script, the miracle of human persistence—
until the church studio, egg-carton walls in cobalt, microphones like hands
dangling from bony arms, all elbows. This time, her words were a giant hand
that descended from heaven, her desperate rage an angel that spoke to her,
touched my face back to life. Where was she in it? I saw no lights,
spoke to nothing but the silent pluck of fingers on the green stem.
A dead snake in the water, guilt and death interlaced
in my mother’s fingers like a spiraling phone cord. Nobody wanted my answers.
I didn’t see coping, only grown people lying into microphones.
I felt this wet weight, chemicals, faith popping in white noise—I knew
how to swim, I just couldn’t—my voice paper-wrapped, so far from me.
Lucian Mattison is a US-Argentinian poet and translator and author of three books of poetry, Curare (C&R Press, 2022), Reaper’s Milonga (YesYes Books, 2018) and Peregrine Nation (Dynamo Verlag, 2017). He is currently based out of Oakland and can be reached via Lucianmattison.com.
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