THE READER'S PICK-UP LINES by matt robinson
you should know it’s colder, here, and Matt Robinson is a Halifax-based poet
cooling. know that mere fictitious harms
done dogs reduce me to what would pass, in
certain climes, for geysered tears; offending
pages thumbed at times pulp-raw, wrung
sweaty-fisted and feral-moist as some left
load of half-done laundry unearthed near-
braided at the far edge of some lake’s humid
cottage-weekend bounty. you should know
each new myopic glance salts my field of
vision; this book a wretched, sodden earth;
unturned. pulp fiction parallax. and you well
know, it’s been suggested, the bark is far
worse than the bite. so, you should know i
set my teeth, and seethe all ortho-tacit; suck
breath after breath after breath. just know i
siphon this air, aphonic – a newly fossiled
fuel; under-tapped, but still well well-headed.
you should know, this is to say, no one other
thing lingers like this telling on the palate;
none spill-slicks congruent along the throat’s
tricky, unmapped shoreline; none sullies that
gulf akin. now, tell me: would you – could
you – be tempted by some gin?
