Philip Matthews | All Parts of the Animal Used

Philip Matthews is a meditation teacher, writer-artist, and witch whose work roots in ritual and performance. His writing has opened to site-specific meditations to support fellow artists, and he has recently led public programs at PLUG Projects and the H&R Block Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute. Poems are forthcoming in High Chair and NILVX, and his collaborative project with photographer David Johnson, Wig Heavier Than A Boot, is currently on view at the Art Connections Gallery in La Grange, Texas. He was a 2016-17 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and this fall, will return as the Second-Year Writing Fellow in Poetry.

Philip Matthews's website.

Also by Philip Matthews: Obedience and Possession Election Day Four Poems

Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry: The Priest and Warrior

May 2018

Philip Matthews

All Parts of the Animal Used

— Angel, Rockwig:

Hornet crashing through the screen I have placed on my father, eyes like a black and white pearl

for temperance. To hold water

over the river and pray — he will pass on with or without this, but I have been taught this

recognition wherein someday, someone

will do this for me. I am in the process

of payment, his orange wings spread like an archer's. The rabbit-hearted

angels come to the bank for their hearts to be slit. There will be twenty

in addition to mine. He will be

sent off in the way according to the godtext — 21

hearts for his chestbones,

head of a sheep for his cock, onyx

in this third eye, to sleep.

Sister, Pupilslit, will take the knife

when I am done,

and carve the angel for luncheon,

hooves in the fire-pit,

hooves in the community's glue.

* — Sister, Pupilslit: I am worried for my brother. He is raving, epileptic bird, with our father's death. I have caught him numerous times with a blade at his heart, moaning like a sheep, dressed in skins. He burns lime-green, in bed, covered in reams of fogged breath. I have heard him announce himself to death, broker an exchange in which flesh is penalty for mourning. Mornings, he takes off his grief and goes through a few hours himself, before, spotting a girl in the market, or changing hands with a beggar outside, he stoops in his grief and I cannot see him. There are times I see only the small, white light of his crown flashing in the waves and want to pull him, like an entrail, out. I want him to live and suspect it is getting harder, surrounded as he is by false water. I really do not know what to do. Husband Papercreased says to let him pay, we do not know what he owes. Husband Starpedal has more sympathy, but then, they are very alike — two fires in a galaxy-lit desert, communing.

The first poem written at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, October 2016. I walked into my apartment, Barn 1, and the Angels rushed down from the wooden rafters. They scratched at my chest. They pulled at my ears. I listened. Rockwig and Pupilslit had appeared years ago, interloping through the context of another project. But had not stayed. Had migrated from St. Louis to Provincetown where they waited for me to arrive. For seven months, Pupilslit and Rockwig, squabbling siblings, inheritors of Fatherangel's corpse, vied for my attention, one or both of them angry, one or both of them erotically charged. I feel one of them (which?) still with me, though perhaps they both are / the drag version of the other, androgynous as Apollo and Artemis.

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