wildscape. literary journal

Even if I could, I would never
by Matthew Chi

                               leave home without reason and run           until my legs turn
                               to smoke. I keep dropping            eggshells everywhere and 
                               can’t bring myself to clean the mess up            so I just step
                               around them. I always        liked the orange shells more than 
                               the white. Orange, like Autumn                   never ended. Like
                               nothing ever fell and died in the grass.                    Fall is just
                               another word           for too much change. You see, I too ate
                               locusts and roots while lost     in my arboretum and rimrock 
                               home. Question:              is it really freedom if you just make 
                               the cage a little bigger?          At the edges of my eyes grew
                               oleander            and milkweed, their silhouette a panopticon 
                               of sight.    Sometimes, I wish I was a caterpillar so I only see
                               what I can hold             but I never trust cut fruit. Never trust         
                               what I cannot pick and hold. Never trust          what I did not 
                               witness emerging from soil up. Even in space, a plant knows        
                               to burrow down and grow up.           On a bus to somewhere 
                               far a friend woke me          with his voice        to ask if suicide 
                               is a sin.  All I could muster was God forgets.  his hands. I can 
                               hear                      my parents telling me pray. Nowadays, I am 
                               godless. It does not matter if 
I will never belong. 

Cold Sweat
by Matthew Chi

Somehow, I find myself running
again & again I am told that nothing 

follows & even then I am cold & 
a boy. Still, my footsteps draw a 

scarecrow in the sand. Sand so cold I
forget it’s sand so I look & look again

feeling like ash

—& it’s as if suddenly I am new & not 
my shadow, but my last body is a pool 

of not-light & still, I lighten and lighten 
until there’s nothing left. What then 

you say—then I take a lamp to the night 
& set the desert afire, the whole fucking world afire 

& in so much glass I see myself. 

**”Cold Sweat” was originally published by Rivener Literary.

about the author // Matthew Chi