MATTHEW J. ANDREWS

★ ★ ★ ★

POETRY

Image by Valeria Smirnova

Stargazer

The pulsing light burning around us dims
when our fingers tangle like lovers’ legs. 

Across the milky span of your arm,
I watch the freckles constellate:

serving spoon, pouncing tiger, archer
with a bow stretched back like canvas.

Love Poem with Chalupas

You’ll forget to eat, they told us,
and they were right, the ceremony
a dizzying parade of symbols: solemn

promises, cake nowhere near our 
mouths. When it was over, we drove our
rattling cans to Taco Bell, ordered a tray

of chalupas dressed neatly in white.
Fifteen years later, I can’t remember 
the words we said to each other,

the food we didn’t touch, the flowers
we picked for the center of each table,
but I remember that purple cathedral,

how we sat in that cheap plastic booth,
lifted the veils off our food, and saw each other 
for the first time. And then we ate.

Strip Monopoly 

I have always belonged to you,
but with this roll of the dice
you have stumbled into a debt.
And so the shirt is peeled off
like the skin of an apple,
revealing the flesh of fruit beneath,
and you begin to inch closer to me,
a proposition on your lips: that we
enter into a sharing of property,
two mouths sharing a harvest.