Matthew Nadelson is an English instructor at Norco College in Norco, California. The following three poems are from his chapbook American Spirit, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2011.
To read more of Matt's work, visit is blog here. The musical accompaniment for "Empty" was created and performed by Justin Dennison, who lives in Provo, Utah.
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One Cell Becoming Two
—For my father, Richard Nadelson, 1942-2009
I enter my father's living
room as he rises with the help
of a walker. His atrophied
legs, limp and thin as twigs,
quiver as he struggles to stand.
The tumor in his esophagus has cut
off the passage of food and spread
to his liver and the wings
of his lungs. There are too many
metastasized cells to remove.
Cutting his chemotherapy
pill in two, I think, "This is one
cell becoming two." Life multiplies
and divides, but what remains
is always uneven. We talk for hours—
a parade of scriptures and pills
it takes him too many minutes
to swallow, arching his head back
and letting gravity do its slow work
like a sparrow digesting its first meal.
White fluid flows through feeding tubes
worming their way into his veins.
He hiccoughs and coughs the bitter
bile into a cup. I want to carry him
in my arms to the beach,
so he can bathe and be reborn
in the womb of the sea,
but the boat I call his body
has already unmoored itself,
and I’m left stranded on an empty shore.
Counting Wayward Sheep
The daylight thins and darkness
slips back into its usual shadows
under my eyes. The heater bursts
like a shot to the heart.
The TV blinks and flickers black
as the coffee keeping me from sleeping.
Today I sold my soul for that Columbian
coffee to a deputy registrar
who said he got five bucks for everyone
he got to register Republican.
Both of us thirsty, we split the difference.
As I sipped my coffee, a homeless man
approached, with eyes like slits
in a wrist and red as the mercury
missing from my thermometer.
I shoved a crumpled dollar,
originally intended for toilet paper,
into the seemingly empty
paper cup he jerked away.
“See this coffee, son? Pure as night,”
he grinned. “An unpolluted soul.”
“But diluted and sugar-coated,
it hardly keeps its coffeehood,”
he said and walked on by. My soul
rebought for toilet paper money, I then stole
a roll from Starbucks, slipped it in my bag,
flung my baglike body on my bike,
and pedaled on the power of the thought
that I, a toilet paper thief, would help
decide the next Republican primary.
And as I lay in bed, I couldn’t help thinking
that these watered-down coffee beans
plucked by the hands
of some Colombian mother
with more earth under her nails
than all that between us and a clenched fist-
stomach as empty as the cup
I tossed into the trash to be buried
deep in the dirt of Columbia to sprout
these "fairly" traded, overpriced magic beans,
cannot be what’s keeping my soul
from sleeping.
Empty
Secret agent man, they’ve given you a number,
and they’ve taken away your name…
“They take away your name,” Mike claims
about the cop he called a pig
before running into me.
“Imagine being called junkie…”
“Or just another number,” I add.
“What’d you say about my mother?” Mike growls
as we step into the light of Telegraph
Avenue, where a mesmerizing mass of flesh
merges into one, one hundred hands
beating the blues into their own
aluminum or plastic cans,
empty spaghetti colander cymbals,
and trash cans not eyeing heaven for change
but flipped on their rims into drums
sending tie-dyed angels spinning,
bodies dissolving into song,
men boxing air, wrestling with God,
and nymphs subdued by heroin
sprawled around wooden tables— last supper
saints tonight and ghosts tomorrow,
specters scouring the streets for anything
to sate that old unavoidable void.
We breathe the light of seven hundred suns,
buried deep in the dank empty belly of Blake’s bar,
where no neon angels dance upon the head
of the needle lodged in Mike’s arm.
Fumbling for my beer, I tumble
from my stool and stumble up the stairs,
where Mike mumbles something
of our crumbling immutability,
crumples his changeless Pepsi cup,
and points up to an Army
sign reading “Be all you can be,”
knowing all we all want is to be
known and full of food and something
true, which no one can take away.