Lucian Mattison
HOMUNCULUS

In my mouth………… a heart beats
fly wings around my chest,
…………………..spill fruit juice
down my chin.………. I feel the impossibility
of previous months spent thinking

I could grow alone,
………………………….unhinged from a lover,
my image knocking dumbly about
in a glass of tap water

by my bedside.…… I’ve tried to be a head
wrapped tight

in the sepals of sleep,
…………………………….remaining closed
at the end of a leaf node —

But today a new lover leaves my apartment
in the morning, and I dive

……………………………..headfirst into the pit
of a drupe, my burrowing tongue
trying to reenter her origin. I carry

her idea in me, cored desire.
……………………………..My stomach fills

like a ponderous drop of sugared water,
mango in my right hand
……………………………………….the rain
gathered at the point of a leaf —
………………………………………waiting for it
to reach its critical mass — inevitable
drip, my consciousness

a seed stuck with toothpicks, hovering
half-submerged in a glass. Alone

………I grow a peeling mask,
contrived, unaware
……………………………I’m drowning
in my own liquids. I thought I could grow

desire in an empty home, the sun
enough to sprout leaves
………………………………from bone marrow,

but I only see a bare balcony, a smaller man
looking out. I offer myself
………………………………….to my lover, again

in my bedroom, because what I let open
……………………………..somehow opens wider
than the limits of the bloom, panicles

…………branched like veins of her inner thigh
and wrists, these thousands
…………of ways leading back to the heart.

Lucian Mattison is an Argentinian American poet. His full-length collection, Peregrine Nation, won the 2014 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize from The Broadkill River Press. He is the winner of the 2016 Puerto Del Sol Poetry Prize and his poems appear in Four Way Review, Hobart, Muzzle, Nashville Review, and elsewhere online and in print. His fiction appears in Fiddleblack and is forthcoming in Nano Fiction and Per Contra. He works at The George Washington University and is an associate editor for Big Lucks. To read more visit Lucianmattison.com

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #14.