Matt Mitchell
Matt Mitchell (he/him/his) is a writer from Warren, Ohio. He is either currently listening to The Cars or drinking a Vanilla Coke or both. His work has appeared in journals like BARNHOUSE, Homology Lit, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Gordon Square Review, and Drunk Monkeys, among others. He’d love to talk to you about basketball.
Website: https://neutralspaces.co/matt_mitchell/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/matt_mitchell48 |
A Portrait [of Another Night in Our Hometown]
in the car, on the bypass where we used to cruise on weekends in high school, we still blare ice cube’s “it was a good day” & only rap the part about fucking around & snagging a triple-double. & our eyes still glisten off oncoming headlights like newborn stars. & we talk shit on the new england patriots just like the old days, argue who the best receiver in the league is. & when we get bored, we sit in silence in the parking lot & let the song fade out just as we did when we were seventeen. & our kicks glisten in the blue moonlight like the snow. & i do not talk about how i’m afraid of the man packing a clip on his hip in this burger joint, or that i am still used to gargling hard Fs & two syllables in my mouth, beneath the taste of dick still lingering, without resisting. & i once looked a man in the eye after he called me what i am, for wanting to look pretty, & saw a clenched fist, but what was gay as fuck back then could easily be a bullet now.
Commentary
Matt on "A Portrait [of Another Night in Our Hometown]":
I think I’ve always been interested in the ways we can write a narrative in so few words. I’ve been working on a series of “portrait” prose poems, each detailing a specific memory in my life that has shaped my identity somehow. This piece, detailing an encounter with someone—whose appearance was quite similar to that of someone I went to high school with, but wasn’t him—who was open-carrying at a restaurant my friend and I love to go to.
I wrote this poem in one sitting immediately after it happened. That’s how I normally do my writing, the entire poem at once, and then I spend a few days editing. Some poems come out easily and everything you want to say is just there. This is one of those poems, for sure.
Lately, I’ve been invested in the different types of voltas that can be presented to the reader. What kind of turn can I take at the end of a poem? Hanif Abdurraqib once told me you have to fool the reader and complete the third act of a magic trick, “The Prestige,” and bring back the thing you’ve made disappear. In this poem, I tried to achieve that by blending the prestige with a powerful turn, which, in magic, is when you can make something ordinary do something extraordinary.
EIC Christine Taylor on "A Portrait [of Another Night in Our Hometown]":
What drew me most to Matt's work is the dance on the fine ice of safety that exists in the setting of this poem. The speaker recalls the "high school" days of comfort when there were a group of like-friends innocently jammin' in the car to lyrics that spoke to who they were. But those things change in ever so drastic—ever so mortal—ways when bigotry takes on the physical manifestation of the gun. That we threaten the identities and the very existence of other people is terrifying to me, and I see it happen. Often. It has happened to me. And every day, we need to renew our commitment to working against this bigotry.
I think I’ve always been interested in the ways we can write a narrative in so few words. I’ve been working on a series of “portrait” prose poems, each detailing a specific memory in my life that has shaped my identity somehow. This piece, detailing an encounter with someone—whose appearance was quite similar to that of someone I went to high school with, but wasn’t him—who was open-carrying at a restaurant my friend and I love to go to.
I wrote this poem in one sitting immediately after it happened. That’s how I normally do my writing, the entire poem at once, and then I spend a few days editing. Some poems come out easily and everything you want to say is just there. This is one of those poems, for sure.
Lately, I’ve been invested in the different types of voltas that can be presented to the reader. What kind of turn can I take at the end of a poem? Hanif Abdurraqib once told me you have to fool the reader and complete the third act of a magic trick, “The Prestige,” and bring back the thing you’ve made disappear. In this poem, I tried to achieve that by blending the prestige with a powerful turn, which, in magic, is when you can make something ordinary do something extraordinary.
EIC Christine Taylor on "A Portrait [of Another Night in Our Hometown]":
What drew me most to Matt's work is the dance on the fine ice of safety that exists in the setting of this poem. The speaker recalls the "high school" days of comfort when there were a group of like-friends innocently jammin' in the car to lyrics that spoke to who they were. But those things change in ever so drastic—ever so mortal—ways when bigotry takes on the physical manifestation of the gun. That we threaten the identities and the very existence of other people is terrifying to me, and I see it happen. Often. It has happened to me. And every day, we need to renew our commitment to working against this bigotry.