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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
      • Kate Sweeney Spring 2022
      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Nonfiction Spring 2022 >
      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022

​Matthew Ostapchuk

They Built Suburbs on Boot Hill


When I heard that Billy the Kid was dead, had been for some time, I was concerned because last I’d checked he was still kicking, living next door to me. The neighborhood watch wasn’t happy with him. They had noticed the coyotes creeping in at his lawn’s edge. At midday the grass withered to brown; a distant bell tolled. Walking by his ancient stable, one could hear the blooded stallions, a clatter of hooves, could feel humid breath on the back of the neck. Nighttimes I heard gunshots, had complained to the police on more than one occasion. Billy came by the house one night not long ago, pounded on the back door until I stumbled over, just out of bed, groggy from a dream about the ocean. I opened the door; he lunged at me. I thought it was a knife in his hand at first, or a flounder, but realized after he collapsed, sobbing, that it was a tulip. He had been drinking. Confessed to me how terrified he was of becoming a sunset cowboy. When I heard he was dead I went to check. Where I remembered his house there was now a desert. I pricked myself on a cactus; a tumbleweed trailed past; a half-buried skeleton of a bison caught the wind, low-moaned through its eye sockets.
​

My Father: After Lightning


My father liked to tell me about the time he was struck by lightning and his body split into halves down the middle. Finally he saw himself without a mirror, experienced first hand the bent of his lips, the troubled quiver in his hand and eye, laid fingertips gingerly upon his half ’s cheek. He was vulnerable, opened intimate. He could see the cavity where his heart had once rested. He took a pinecone, filled the gaping hole. He began replacing the other organs: a stone for his liver, cicada shells for kidneys. He removed his tear ducts completely. He discarded his finger- and toenails. He discovered a flaking vellum scroll tucked around his spine, upon which all of his truths were written; let the wind breath life back into crumbling paper. He took out his mind, scrubbed it clean of memory in the river—lost hold of it in the flow of the river—sculpted one anew from the river’s loam. He told me how arduous it was to pull himself back together, to seal the wound, because it meant he would never again be able to know himself, always a broken whole.
​

The Boy Made of Mud

                                          
My grandmother told me he had been murdered by his father, a man given to bouts of paranoia, terrified his son was bedeviled because he could read poetry by the time he was six, enjoyed reciting lines of Eliot, how “April is the cruellest month.” The father had drowned his son in the river. My parents told me to disregard the mad ranting of my grandmother, but also to stay away from the boy. I didn’t listen, a child like all children, but instead started bringing the boy books of verse. Sometimes I would see him standing by the river—sometimes he wouldn’t be there. We were friends, or were at least as close as a boy of flesh and a boy of mud could be. I read him parts of Whitman, and he recited Ovid and Langston Hughes from memory, until one day I went down to the river after a spring rain and found only a mud puddle and a soggy page of Keats. My parents told me to stop concerning myself with trivialities; handed me a dense volume of collected instruction manuals and escapist prose.


Ode to a Star-Eyed Beauty


O, cherubic lubadub; you runamuck boy,
framed up by a pale plate-glass dawn, window cut—
all night-tame & rough-tussled; elegant & coy.

Last night, slackjawed by your hips, your halogen joy,
I watched you dance slipstreamed & sideways: sweet-ass strut
of a cherub, a heartthrob, a runamuck boy.

& this sorry sucker so luststruck, fawned (the ploy
of he besot with loinsfire & a wet dream’s rut:
a night-time of tussling rough—elysian, uncoy),

lazyeyed, bought you booze. These punch-drunk hands toyed
at your knuckles, your fingertips—this sauced fool stuck
on you, cherubic lubadub, runamuck boy.

—O sweet desire, you streetweaved back with me, buoyed
on my shoulder, lips dripping syrup notes. I cupped
you: hair all night-tame & rough-tussled, smiling coy.

Snuck upstairs, past sleeping ears & dark, to enjoy
a moment enraptured beneath dusk’s bedclothes, tucked
all night-tame & rough-tussled, elegant & coy,
me & this star-eyed beauty, my runamuck boy.


 

​
--
Matthew Ostapchuk is a graduate of Chester College of New England, and is currently pursuing his MFA at Hollins University. His work has also appeared or is upcoming in Insolent Aardvark, Interrobang!? Magazine, Specter Literary Magazine, and Best New Poets 2010, among others.

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  • Home
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  • Previous Issues
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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
      • Kate Sweeney Spring 2022
      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Nonfiction Spring 2022 >
      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022