by Matthew Tuckner
It’s true, I will most likely die
in starchy sheets completely foreign
to me, but what am I to do,
for now, with this onion-light
reaching through the crosshatch
of conifer & hornbeam
I only notice because I wish
to be ordained with the truth,
absolutely smothered in it,
like the student who came to me
crying after he crushed
a cluster of ladybugs in anger.
In the hospital, you seemed to grow
closer to it—something silent, something
translucent, a flinch of gossamer
soaked in names like the trophy case
of fishhooks dangling from
the mouth of a spotted bass.
We filled your ears with singing
as this emperor of bees, this potentate
of geysers, grabbed the steering wheel
& racked it all the way to the left.
I think I’m beginning to understand loss
as the loss of understanding.
The hornbeam is actually a service berry.
A group of ladybugs is called a loveliness
my student teaches me, as I continue to
to correct his mistaken remainders,
as I demonstrate this long division.
Matthew Tuckner received his MFA in creative writing at NYU and is currently a PhD candidate in English/creative writing at the University of Utah. His debut collection of poems, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. His chapbook, Extinction Studies, is the winner of 2023 Sixth Finch Chapbook Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The Adroit Journal, and Best New Poets 2023, among others.