Matthew Henriksen
The Story of God
I texted my ex and after a few days she responded with a nothing
That brought me back to nothing
I realize I am in love with poetry
This afternoon a blue jay flew up from the road
And away from the car
Then back at the car and nearly into the window
I said so to my daughter
In her car seat and she laughed and said Daddy that’s a trick
And I tried to explain there are things we don’t
See because of where we are sitting
I said sometimes birds fly into cars
And because I am in love with poetry and not my own break up
I don’t want what I said to my daughter to mean anything
But unlike my ex my daughter responds
Laughing and she doesn’t believe me when I say
Birds can fly into cars
And her laughing and my inability to explain one small possible reality
Sort of let the car float for a moment
Above the daylight into a thicker liquid light
The metaphor can’t relate to me if the initial image is just a trick
As my daughter says
We bought squirt guns and she ran around the park shooting trees
She shot up the trees and ran all over the grass
And climbed down to the creek and took off her shoes and walked in the water
And threw the biggest rocks she could lift from the creek
Back into the creek bed
I watched her as I held my phone
And wanted to tell her that she is a trick
That blue jays are not real
And the creek is not full of water
That she cannot throw a rock into the same creek once
When she has grown tired of the wind beating her car
As she drives on the interstate away from a disaster
I can’t imagine now, I imagine
She will see that the past is empty of us
And the world unfolds until it isn’t a world
Just lint from someone else’s hamper
But how do we throw that away
When it’s the world
I texted my ex and after a few days she responded with a nothing
That brought me back to nothing
I realize I am in love with poetry
This afternoon a blue jay flew up from the road
And away from the car
Then back at the car and nearly into the window
I said so to my daughter
In her car seat and she laughed and said Daddy that’s a trick
And I tried to explain there are things we don’t
See because of where we are sitting
I said sometimes birds fly into cars
And because I am in love with poetry and not my own break up
I don’t want what I said to my daughter to mean anything
But unlike my ex my daughter responds
Laughing and she doesn’t believe me when I say
Birds can fly into cars
And her laughing and my inability to explain one small possible reality
Sort of let the car float for a moment
Above the daylight into a thicker liquid light
The metaphor can’t relate to me if the initial image is just a trick
As my daughter says
We bought squirt guns and she ran around the park shooting trees
She shot up the trees and ran all over the grass
And climbed down to the creek and took off her shoes and walked in the water
And threw the biggest rocks she could lift from the creek
Back into the creek bed
I watched her as I held my phone
And wanted to tell her that she is a trick
That blue jays are not real
And the creek is not full of water
That she cannot throw a rock into the same creek once
When she has grown tired of the wind beating her car
As she drives on the interstate away from a disaster
I can’t imagine now, I imagine
She will see that the past is empty of us
And the world unfolds until it isn’t a world
Just lint from someone else’s hamper
But how do we throw that away
When it’s the world
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Matthew Henriksen’s first book, Ordinary Sun, appeared on Black Ocean in 2011, and a second is coming from the same press in 2015. Recent poems appear in Brooklyn Rail, HTML Giant, Agriculture Reader, The Cultural Society, N/A, Ampersand Review, Apartment, Yalobusha Review, and Timber Journal. He co-edits the online poetry journal Typo, sporadically publishes Cannibal, a hand-bound literary journal, and runs The Burning Chair Readings. He currently lives in the Arkansas Ozarks and works at the Dickson Street Bookshop.
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