His low, madrone-colored drummingskitters over the knotted tuft of marshlike a siren skimming the unkemptsongs on the insides of our throatsthirsting for sun. I love watching himdip his enormously long beakin the water, his camouflage ruffled,wading in before stutteringinto another swoop toward the mountain.When it was clear that my fatherwould not come back, my mother beganmaking lists: where to throw outhis clothes, where to get the pills,the places his hands had been.She substituted food for Virginia Slimsand at night tugged the phone off its hook.She pulled the fern from its socketand threw its frenzy of hair on the floor.Sometimes, on the patio, singingthe songs that made her feel like a girlagain, I would fumble the chorusand the same notes began ridingthe starless heat of our mouths,and though this didn’t call him back,though we knew it wouldn’t, thoughwe could barely look at each otherthis is how I’ve used my voice since then:not to be beautiful, not to contend withwhatever question each season is singing,not even to try to convince anyoneI am sane and going to be all right,but more like the snipe veering overthis soggy meadow, calling out to no one,just using his voice to know that he is here.
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“Snipe” from BEFORELIGHT: by Matthew Gellman.
Published by BOA Editions, Ltd. on April 30 , 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Matthew Gellman.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Matthew Gellman’s first book, Beforelight, was selected by Tina Chang as the winner of BOA Editions, Ltd.’s A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His second book, The Understudy, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2027. Matthew has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Brooklyn Poets, Adroit’s Djanikian Scholars Program, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and elsewhere. His poems are featured or forthcoming in Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Indiana Review, The Common, the Missouri Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and other publications. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.
“In Beforelight, Matthew Gellman’s astonishing and sensitive début collection, family narratives unfold with the clarity and mystery of a photo album. Illuminating the brutal silences and blanketing snows of the suburbs, Gellman’s poems make the world of memory startlingly intimate and alive.”
— Richie Hofmann, author of A Hundred Lovers
“The poems in Matthew Gellman's Beforelight radiate with tenderness and desire, speaking evocatively from the starless heat of our mouths and from the glowing embers of queer quotidian life. His poetry illuminates the contours of filial, sibling, and sexual bonds revealing at the core of his work a finely wrought portrait of a boy with apertures / yielding more apertures flourishing red and agape.”
— Deborah Paredez, author of Year of the Dog
“I am moved and startled by the intensity of Beforelight, which is bent on retrospection, and profound in its careful examination of the family and the ways we are both beholden to and estranged from them. These poems also give voice to the necessity of declaring one’s individuality, and in doing so, they combine sophisticated, psychological insight with rich, original musicality. This is a daring, memorable new voice in American poetry, and a spellbinding debut.”
— Mark Wunderlich, author of God of Nothingness
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