Matthew Gellman
TRIP

The slick silver thread of highway
pulls taut over the Keystone State.

Nothing is as I imagined it,
says Mother to the oil field

churning with the polished quiet
of cash for longer than a mile,

eyes greener in the copper
industrial light. It is 1999.

My father has built a wall
inside her, rust on roses,

a wheel’s fever. The child
kicks like a miniature Samson,

swims the darkening length.

Matthew Gellman’s poems are featured or forthcoming in Thrush, H.O.W. Journal, Lambda Literary, Poetry Quarterly, DIALOGIST, Two Peach, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize and a scholarship from the NYS Summer Writer’s Institute. He lives in New York and is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University.

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #14.