I don’t think can you really know anyone until they’re silent. Distant. Lost above a mass so blue it spins almost arrogant in the black. When I looked down, I was sick to my stomach. So much hope there. Planted flags like a child’s page of practiced signatures: spurs and apexes; hooks and crossbars. All coming right at you. And not a sound to be found. Losing you was an old story, like birth, like the brief dilation of plastic and metal we slip from; water that loves us so much we drown. Again and again. It’s as old as the story of the saint and the revolutionary: how one asks us what we would kill for, and the other what we would die for. And no, I can never remember which is which. But I do know this: we’re beautiful, Matt. I can see it, even at this height. Even through this tiny window. What I wanted to tell you is: I was always better at falling than flying. Weight as a simple single axis. But you tell me: where do we go when the world won’t talk to us anymore? What bar do we stumble in to then?
Matthew Minicucci is the author of two collections of poetry: Translation (Kent State University Press, 2015), chosen by Jane Hirshfield for the 2014 Wick Poetry Prize, and Small Gods, forthcoming from New Issues Press in 2017. He is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Wick Poetry Center, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received his MFA. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from numerous journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2014, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, and The Southern Review, among others.