17 Kinds of Hungry

Adrian Matejka

Until around sundown, the surviving lilies in the yard stay wide open, like the window of a car passing on a hot day. No music from the flowers, but they smell like somebody’s fragrant soap unwrapped on a dish edged with daisies. All those smells expressing themselves haphazardly like a band trying to tune up. Escape is what I’ve wanted since I was little, cramped in summertime Section 8: flowers everywhere, my bird-legged brother a couple steps back, my sister book-nosed somewhere in the radius of us. Just a deciduous minute when the blossom of noises was from my own AM radio & not my thin stomach. No more backtalks, no more slapbacks. Just a quick inhale before I tiptoed out the front door. Unlatch, turn, run away. Escape, as Indiana bats wheeled up top, chirping sonorous somethings. I ran under them & to the bus, past those long-necked lilies, self-congratulatory in their exploded colours. Their purples leaned the way June does, their reds hot as the woman’s attitude waiting at the bus stop while the #17 scooted past without picking us up.

October Sonnet

Adrian Matejka

Even on the 13th floor of a high building, Chicago’s  wind winds its slick way through any unsecured  window on its singsong to the lake. It’s fine-tuned, 

perfectly pitched in this sinister season  of cackling jack-o’-lanterns & candy corns  nobody eats unless they’re the last sweets left.

Bags of fun nonsense for all the little ninjas  & ghosts. It’s true, I weep too much when  the seasons partition: snack-sized tears dropping onto 

tear-sized leaves swirling in the autumn  of my reproduction. Occasional receipts & parking  tickets, too, yellowed during their own windy migrations. 

Like the rest of us gusty apparitions, every  untethered thing ends up at the lake shore seasonally.