Creative Writing from
Fairleigh Dickinson University
MFA Program

Flight

Elinor Mattern

On the runway the lights, cerulean, ruby, emerald, and snow
look like Christmas lights scattered, thrown down
across a huge field. Their colors are a language to airplanes
but meaningless to me, except for beauty.
Can beauty be meaningless? As we taxi in the dark,
gorgeous curves take shape, match grooves in the tarmac.
The signs are on for Fasten Your Seatbelts and No Smoking.
On the inside of the window 1 see my own chest move;
outside, miles away, a street I've never driven, whose name
I'll never know. The plane is so noisy in takeoff, straining
like birth to break into air and I feel sadness at leaving
the ground, not Atlanta where I've been only forty minutes
to switch planes but earth, land, and the lights, that language.
That particular blue, my best. Bumps like Braille.
And I looked down at sunset streaks from another plane window
on my first flight tonight, the orange and grey so original
I couldn't even cry. And now the lights are getting smaller,
the runway and cars, the antiness of everything, and the houses
hurt me somehow, too many, I want to be part of them all. I am.
I am so tiny. But I'm too big. My one little body isn't little.
There's too much of me. And I'm looking sideways at stars,
and my daughter is at Space Camp, and down at clouds
and she wants to see stars up close and sunsets every hour
and tomorrow she will tell me about weightlessness. On my right
a man from Huntsville, Alabama, seat 27A, talks to the quiet man
from Israel, 27B, about Birmingham, Martin and Milosevich.
The seatbelt signs, off for just a minute, are back on
on this flight too short for a movie or even a drink. And now
I begin to see tiny streetlamps like noble, upright matchsticks
growing larger in the foggy dark, we're descending, and the
pictures in the runway lights begin to reveal themselves,
like constellations, a Kachina doll, the letter E,
armadillo, alligator, an elm tree, the Statue of Liberty,
that brave, lonely woman with light.

        [Forthcoming Orison, 2002]

Valentine

Elinor Mattern

It's more like a bruised plum,
a bloody mass, really, like liver.
It's the size of your fist

and always bleeding,
raw, ragged, noisy.
It never shuts up.

You feel it like an itch,
like the taste
of your mother's hair in your mouth.

It beats and pitches,
its ventricles rigged for hope.
It never stops

until the day it does,
and you hate how much you love it,
need its pounding

measuring your days,
its voice
the only one you know.

        [Published in The Sow's Ear, 2001]

Love Song

Elinor Mattern

The dead know what time it is all the time.
The dead know snow from the inside out.

The dead know the taste of clouds
and that breathing isn't enough.

But the dead have forgotten how a word is a sound.
and now they know only the language of planets.

They know the temperature of midnight
and that rain can't live without trees.

The dead know cold is not the opposite of hot.
The dead know tears aren't salt by accident.

We can't live without knowing
and the dead know knowing doesn't fix it all.

The dead know that drowning
is the price of crawling from the sea.

Instinct

Elinor Mattern

I wake one morning to find myself an armadillo.
Of course, I've always been at my best around water,


worked my way up to six somersaults in one breath,
and now I find I can empty my lungs, crawl along the bottom

and come up ten minutes later, Houdini-like.
Or, I can fill myself up with air and float for hours,

days, maybe, if I could get the time. I just wanted to feel safe.
I guess I prayed a little too hard, and She figured

this is what it would take. So, now I have
these bony plates, nine of them, with hinges.

But, I'm starting to miss skin
even if it abrades so easily, tears like paper,

even though it bleeds.

Increments of Grace

Elinor Mattern

She had a very tiny heart.
She didn't ask for it.
It just came that way,

her inheritance from the joining
of her tiny-hearted parents.
But one day it seemed to hum.

And when she began to dance
it was definitely breathing.
Imagine her surprise

the day she woke and found it
on the outside of her body.
The doctors were alarmed

and said We must operate.
It will never survive the elements,
wasn't made to withstand

the wind and rain. But she said No.
It wants to see the world for itself.
In truth it had begun to speak to her.

At first she tried to ignore it, but it grew
louder. Until the day the doorbell rang
and she found the tiny package,

the glittery paper, the bow, the tag
that said, For Girl's Heart, It was then
she noticed the little opening, the mouth.

It was just the right size
and the gift went straight in.
Yum, her heart said.

        [Published in Orison, 2000]

Forgiving God

Elinor Mattern

She is a big moon face
leaning over the curve of the earth

where I stand, bent, bag of stones
on my shoulder. I set down my sack

and She reaches for it,
takes out an obsidian that weeps

with the eyes of my sister
and She swallows it.

Next, She chooses the green slate,
flinty with my father's eyes

and She eats that, too. Then the carnelian,
bleeding my mother, She holds it to her lips

and it's gone. One by one,
She picks up, then swallows

every pebble I've carried forty years,
'til all that remains is my sack.

She reaches for the dusty burlap,
dries my eyes, wraps it

round my shoulders and says,
O Daughter of Dust,

your name is Grace.

        [Published in Orison, 2000]

Dayenu

Elinor Mattern

I cut off my tail.
I had my lips sewn shut.
I chewed up the words in my throat.
I grew warts.
I cut my wings.
I put stones in my shoe.
I sanded the wood of my legs.
I crawled across the chessboard.
I lowered the temperature of my blood.
I canned my peaches and buried them.
I carried my house with me.
I slept in the closet.
Even so.
Even so.

        [Published in Orison, 2000]