Infinite Tigers by Lucian Mattison
Two tigers lurk the garden, paw doorknobs open.
I climb out a window amid the panic, fill the truck
with a laptop, towel, armful of homegrown
ghost peppers, picked amid the scramble.
Tigers, all sinew and stripe, spill out the window
after me, force me back inside the house.
I latch locks, shut panes, but they keep finding new doors,
more ways in to feed the loop of their hunt.
Apparently, this is my ideal self. He, who risks
being torn apart so that he may pick the fruits
he was really looking forward to eating.
Habit becomes a cracked mug on Saturday morning,
hot coffee puddled in a ring on the countertop,
a slow leak. The roommate watches
American football, murder of cold
fries in Styrofoam and foil in front of him.
The crowd’s murmurs fill the living room.
On screen, ten-thousand people in a bowl
wear other people’s names across their back.
I remain shirtless, a cinched bag of water
and teeth, completely myself, until I see the pillowcase
imprints striping my cheek
in the bathroom mirror. A growl suits me, rips
into the part of me that thinks so highly
of our remarkable existence. I sleep again, a heavy,
helpless thing protests atop sheets
as it snores. No choice but to embrace the tigers,
they cycle back every ninety minutes.
Just like terror, I’m familiar with their movements.
Some lucky nights, I become conscious
of the fiction—wait, wasn’t this my house seven years ago?—
disorder and death moot points. Still, tigers
stalk uninterrupted, fierce, and I don’t want it
any other way. Here, the tenor of the world
is different, the exact feeling sought while awake.
Humidity bends the image of the beasts,
blends stripes. I can let them devour me into wakefulness,
but I’m light on my feet. There is so much
dreamed space I have yet to see, so much more levity.
So, I let the teeth closer, my hot breath on my fingers.
US-Argentinian poet and translator, Lucian Mattison is the author of three books of poetry, Curare (C&R Press, 2022), Reaper’s Milonga (YesYes Books, 2018) and Peregrine Nation (Dynamo Verlag, 2017). His work has won the Puerto Del Sol Poetry Prize and appears in numerous journals, including The Adroit Journal, Catamaran, CutBank, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Nashville Review, [PANK], The Offing, and Sixth Finch. He is currently based out of the Bay Area and is an associate editor of poetry for Barrelhouse.
