Matthew W. Baker

Poetry

Matthew W. Baker grew up in Pittsburgh, PA but currently lives in Reno, NV and teaches high school English. He received his MFA from the University of Nevada, Reno. His work has appeared in The Vitni Review, The Summerset Review, The Matador Review, Booth Journal, Sundog Lit, Yemassee Journal, The Meadow, among others, and has been nominated for the Best New Poets and Best of the Net anthologies. His debut chapbook, Undoing the Hide’s Taut Musculature, released from Finishing Line Press in October 2019. He can be found on Twitter at @mmbakes and Instagram at @emembakes.

I’m told the story of how my college-age father “fell” from a building but survived,

and I pause the moment he steps off (what I wanted in youth: for him to stop badgering me), fine penny loafers scuffing the sky. I pause before the body becomes bullet, becomes a blood-flower blooming on cement (was I still sleeping in my mom’s bed; was I still wearing her nightgowns; was I chasing girls yet; was I was I was I—). His hair mid-flutter from breeze brisk for that late in spring. Was the building a bell tower? Did he think himself a more tragic Quasimodo, his whole being—receding hairline (the pictures show, even that young), beer-induced belly beginning to convex his center— one great hunched back? It would be easy for me to mock his pain. Poor petrified man not knowing how to make sense of his singular life. But how can I judge him for trying when I, too, thought my privileged life was a host of menacing claws clamoring for a rip of my skin; when I, too, saw the edges of things and pined for the slippery shift, for my body to be set loose like a kite wriggling in flight. Anything but that plain, earthly life. It would be too easy to scroll past the image, leave it undeveloped in the dark room of my mind. I want him to have been better. I want me to be better than I am. So instead I imagine he falls not down but up, feet-first through the glass ceiling of another life, and when he lands, he exits the water there onto the bright white stones of a river’s bank.

“ This poem was born from a story my uncle told me as he was driving me to the airport after my cousin’s wedding. I didn’t really know my father while he was alive because we had a strained relationship, but I’ve been lucky enough to learn more about him from my aunts and uncle. On this drive, my uncle very candidly told me about my father’s drug and alcohol problems (catalyzed by abuse from his father) and followed up with a story about how my father was ultimately expelled from his first college: by jumping off the roof of one building and causing damage to himself and another structure. It’s unclear if my father purposely jumped or was in some drunken or drug-induced haze, but I wanted to try to imagine his decision. This poem is, too, a way for me to provide a blank slate for my father somewhere divorced from his problems in this life—somewhere he can flourish. I wanted to offer him a sliver of light, wherever his ghost may have gone. ”

Listen: