Matthew Dickman is from Portland, Oregon, and has been honored with writing fellowships from the Michener Center, Vermont Studio Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He has won the APR/Honnickman First Book Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University for his book full-length collection, “All American Poem.” His poems have appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Tin House, The Normal School, Clackamas Literary Review, and Lyric, as well as two chapbooks. Mr. Dickman is author of the chapbooks, "Amigos" and "Something About a Black Scarf." When not attending a writer's residency, he works in a bakery, where he can "shape five baguettes in under three minutes." Mr. Dickman will be leading one of the Spring 2010 conference workshops.Watch Mr. Dickman reading "Coffee."
West Hills
My brother is in heaven
above the West Hills, swimming
in a swimming pool, behind a big house
built on the side of a hill
on stilts so it won’t go crashing down
into the long boulevard below it. Built that way
so the house won’t jump, won’t one day decide
it’s over, nothing left, the dark from the evergreen trees
making it all seem like closets and midnight.
My brother is on his back looking up at the sky. He’s full
of cocaine and Heineken so there is no telling him apart
from the sun or the sky or the shining stars his hands make,
the water falling from his fingers
back into the wet body of the pool so that each drop is a spark, a flash.
Whenever I drive up here, through
the black curves, I wonder which house it is, which one
became a kind of vacation
for his heart, what the bathroom looks like, whose bottle
of Vicodin he carried between the soft skin of his waist and the elastic
band of his swim trunks, if that person was a woman, if she was beautiful,
if later she pulled him, soaking, past the leather furniture,
past the mirrors and Chinese vases throwing up their long silvery petals,
into the bedroom and then knelt down
in front of his body which by then was all electricity and chemical halos, if
she took his shorts by the waist or by the pockets, if she knew he was already
stuffing his wrists with razors
like strange envelopes or building the pyramids
of pills that would take him to Tutankhamen, that he was planning his
New Kingdom, if she listened to him breathing at night and if she loved him.
Matthew Dickman
from The Normal School, Volume 2, Issue 2, Fall 2009
