Matt Broaddus
Poetry
Matt Broaddus is currently a first year PhD student in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his MFA in creative writing from New York University. His poetry has recently appeared in Whiskey Island, Barnstorm, Switchback, and elsewhere. He is originally from Virginia.
Home
I go into the mist tonight. Another black man is dead. My country is authorized. I am allowed to be angry in the mist. To get to my mist I cross the signs repeating in the important languages, You are leaving the American zone. It is important to know what I have given up by crossing into myself. In the mist it’s misty, but I can see. Okigbo is there with the goddess. So’s a knight in full armor charging thin air. There are silences where screams should be. I wanted to come here to consider the origin of heaven and earth. But today a man is dead. Today is every day of my life. No one taught me to be angry. Okigbo immerses himself in the river that is his goddess. The knight rides aimless, thrusting a lance into darkness. Riot police show up and throw tear gas. Hey, this is my mist, I say, and they fire.
“ I wrote ‘Home’ in August of 2014 after the protests over Michael Brown's death began in earnest. Brown's death and the protests in Ferguson brought home to me a real sense of my difference as a black man in this country. I was angered by the militarized response of the police to the protests going on in Ferguson. In the poem, I try to go to a place where this country's violent, militarized response to blackness can't reach me, an interior place—the mist. Christopher Okigbo is a poet I admire whose ability to create his own powerfully personal environs seemed somehow related to the poem I was writing, so I thought, ‘Why not include him in the mist?’—that interior space the speaker retreats to in the poem. ”
Oracle Machine
to know desert is underfoot.
I am propelled forward
with no highway, I dream
without a body. It is easy
to find answers—a tea kettle
gurgling in the sand, a fire
unattended. Across the plains,
an archive of destinations spreads.
The smell of mint, half a footprint
in the sand. Every grain yearns
for the unasked question.
“ ‘Oracle Machine’ is a title taken from George Dyson's excellent book ‘Turing's Cathedral’ about the early efforts to create what we think of today as the computer. Dyson makes a connection between modern search engines and a hypothetical device Alan Turing called an ‘oracle machine.’ In one sense, an oracle machine is a machine that can ask for an answer from another party. I was fascinated by this concept and Dyson's discussion of search engines as machines that learn click by click from users what answers are most pertinent to search queries. I had been thinking about these ideas on and off for a few months after reading the book, and one day I found myself translating some of those ideas in my own language and my own imagined understanding of the concepts into a scene that took place in a desert landscape full of details that are results and questions simultaneously. ”