Matthew Tuckner

THE FUTURE, WITH FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

First things first, it took
the word for tangerine,
leaving only orange
to describe the contours
of daylight. Some of us
tried streetlamp to get
at its softness. Others tried
ballet slipper on pinker afternoons
we grew too old to stay in
past sunset. It came
whip fast, moving northward
through the mulch, bursting
from the earth as a tiger lily
or a warning, depending on
where you were standing,
a warning I heard and hid from
under splintered lecterns, in the hearts
and minds of lovers, anywhere
it wouldn’t think to look.
It stripped the very words
from my books. Gone
were parallelogram, cowslip,
the plosive k in kite.
It reckoned itself the king
of me, swinging from the lowest
declension of the tallest trees,
shaking down the leaves
I’d push from my shoulders
as I trudged further into the fat
borders of its country. It shoved
my face into the ruby carpet
of its plans: pesticides tearing
through the belly of a honey bee,
a bushel of oak trees
swallowed by lakes of blue flame,
whorls of cancer trellised
over my bones. I only wanted
the endlessness of this, followed by
that, followed by some more
of this, and decades more of that,
but all I have is the oh no it’s gone
I can squeeze between my fists.
I wanted to be the tusk of a walrus,
something that would continue
to grow from me, in spite of me,
something that could be distilled
for its ivory, shaved down
to the size of a pebble, shaped
into the eyes our children
will hammer into the statues
they sculpt of themselves
to make sure they live forever.

MATTHEW TUCKNER is an MFA candidate at NYU and Poetry Editor of Washington Square. He is the recipient of a University Prize from the Academy of American Poets, winner of the 2022 Yellowwood Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the inaugural Prufer Poetry Prize. His poems appear in American Poetry Review, 32 Poems, Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, Four Way Review, The Missouri Review, Nashville Review, Pleiades, and Poetry Northwest.