Matthew Siegel

HOW AM I DOING?

Wearing a bathing suit as underwear
is how I’m doing, though I’m learning to ask
better questions like: what’s most important?
And answering: what allows day and night
to live inside us. I’m saying I took those trunks
right off and did all the laundry, even the sheets.
Naked, I spun my mattress around to consider
a new distribution of my heaviest parts.
Most things need to be rotated regularly
if one hopes to get maximum life from them.
How much life am I getting from this life?
I have learned to ask myself, as if rotating
my mind. I feel the urge to smother myself
in the bedsheets and blankets, but I don’t.
I close my eyes, imagine myself as a pin on
the blouse of time, barely holding it together.

MATTHEW SIEGEL is the author of Blood Work (Wisconsin, 2015), winner of the Felix Pollak Prize and finalist for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His poems appear in The Guardian, PBS NewsHour, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Sun. A former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford, he lives in Oakland, California.