Bully Pulpit by Matt W. Miller


 
 

Blonde, blue-eyed boys
of the world, confess

our sad bones to each other—
do not be conscripts

to miracles of hate. You must
know our handsome

is a lie, a confusion of place,
of time, of the eye—

nothing but a pop fly lost
in the sun, suddenly caught

in stiff leather mitts by a blind
stab at the sky.

 
 
 

Matt W. Miller was born and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts. He is the author of Club Icarus, winner of the 2012 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and Cameo Diner: Poems. The recipient of a Wallace Stegner Poetry Fellowship at Stanford University and a Walter E. Dakin Poetry Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, his work has appeared or will appear in Slate, Harvard Review, Southwest Review, Missouri Review, Crazyhorse, River Styx, The Rumpus, and other journals. He teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy and lives in coastal New Hampshire with his family.