Matt LaFreniere

BURNING

“Smelled like…victory.”—                                                                                  
Major Kilgore, Apocalypse Now (1979)                                                                                  

I burned GI Joes with my buddy Jake.
We were ten; it was the end of summer.
The flame to plastic wouldn’t always take,
I’d hold the lighter hard, singe my thumb, fake
manliness, squash the pain. I remember,
when burning Joes with my buddy Jake,
my uncle OD’d on his couch; he looked awake,
Mom said, the war in his belly like embers.
The flame to plastic wouldn’t always take,
you’d have to be thorough, you’d have to wait
out the tedium in each plastic member.
We burned GI Joes, me and Jake,
after the silence of my uncle’s wake
which took something like forever.
The flame to plastic wouldn’t always take,
we grew impatient; we’d simulate
our best napalm efforts: gas and fire.
I burned GI Joes with my buddy Jake;
The flame to plastic wouldn’t always take.

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TRUE STORY

 
When my daughter was born she looked
bewildered, as one does, I guess.
The doctor cupped her head with his palm
like an oracle; her eyes flinched like a liar’s.

I thought she’d look as Fitzgerald’s
Dutch sailors looked: on a fresh, green
breast of the new world. The room’s light
sharpened, the machines buzzed, the haste

deepened. I thought of Alien, how
Ridley Scott rendered birth—all pulsation
and blood and panic. When I was born
my mother bled; I looked at the world and hissed.

Before they stitched her up I scurried to
the cold and the steel and the fluorescence.



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­­Matt LaFreniere lives with his wife and daughter in Baltimore City. He teaches English at the Boys’ Latin School of Maryland. His work has appeared in Pilgrimage Magazine, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Spry Literary Magazine, Utter, and others.  ­­