Matthew Thorburn

Matthew Thorburn is the author of six books, including String, a novel in poems; The Grace of Distance, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize; and the book-length poem Dear Almost, which won the Lascaux Prize. He received a 2025 Finalist award from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Gone

Holding my glasses between finger

and thumb, wiping each lens

with a soft cloth in the living room’s

blurry light, a memory washes over me:

how once I found Grandma T.’s

gold-framed glasses beside the lamp

on the table beside her chair.

I picked them up and saw the lenses

were smudged with fingerprints,

so many overlapping whorls

and ridges thick with dust.

How could she see? Why wasn’t

she wearing them? Where was she?

But the answers to these questions

are gone, gone wherever this memory

went, and though it comes back—

a shard of gray sea glass worn smoother,

but also smaller—they don’t.

Shadow

—Melchior de Hondecoeter, Landscape with Poultry and Birds of Prey,
oil on canvas, date unknown

She loves peanuts, diced cucumber, spring

mix and arugula. Clucks and chirps

her approval at first sight of the white bowl

I fill with oatmeal and corn, or a triangle

of watermelon floating in cool water.

Dear Hondecoeter, you’d fall in love too

and love to watch Shadow peck the strings

and seeds scooped from a cantaloupe

or spot her perched in the overgrown azalea,

black feathers a-shimmer, hints of purple-green

down her neck and wings. But that’s

the wrong tense now. What I remember isn’t

how I found her, after the hawk did—

no words for that, no paint—but how she

waddled through the flowerbeds, plump lady

winding her way through a busy restaurant

to the buffet, nudging aside the yellow daffodils

to munch her favorite hosta down to dirt,

extravagant red sun hat tipped low over one eye.