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Giving voice to these invisible girls, Matos’ narrator tells a story of fierce, maternal love forging a familial bond, as beautiful and loyal as it is corrosive. This eulogy is an intimate, unapologetic conversation “like chess by mail” that sneaks up and stuns us. We are told, “You will need an axe for what is coming next.” Tenacious, neglected, tender, these girls redefine family and make us consider what we’re willing to do for the people we love.—Liz Whiteacre, author of Hit the Ground “Coming alive is terrible,” the speaker of Oxidane warns. She is terribly loyal, a tiny teen bodyguard driven by “compulsive solidarity” to protect her “empyrean and unnameable” friend. Packed with hard truths and witty observations of adolescent friendship, these narrative poems are heavy as a garden hose in winter and yet still “looped in sparking arcs” of language. You will want to know these girls, tame them, drink them back in.—Sara Tracey, author of Some Kind of Shelter Refracting through webs of fractured ice, Matos’ vignettes illuminate the shades of what it means to feel too much. Longing, cruelty, and transcendence intertwine as our narrator, her dark partner, and You, their Muse, drift just below the surface of failed institutions and absent authority, pushing against the thin but unbreakable skin that separates our need for release from our need to belong.—Matt Mullins, author of Three Ways of the SawOxidane has the reach of taut flash fiction fiction and the punch of expertly crafted poetry. It is a truly hybrid animal you’ll think about running from—but you'll find yourself running towards it. —J. Bradley, author of The Bones of UsNicole Matos is a Chicago-based writer, professor, roller derby girl, and proud special needs mom. Her work has appeared in Salon, The Classical, The Rumpus, theNewerYork, The Atticus Review, THE2NDHAND txt, berfrois, Chicago Literati, Aperion Review, neutrons protons, Vine Leaves, Requited, Burningword, Monkeybicycle, Oblong, and others.She has written about higher education for Inside Higher Ed and Pedagogy Unbound, and about special needs parenting for Full Grown People, Brain Mother, and Monday Coffee. You can catch her blogging on Medium and publishing tappable stories on Tapestry, too.She is Associate Professor of English at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, IL, and she competes as Nicomatose #D0A with The Chicago Outfit Roller Derby. Follow her on Twitter at @nicole_matos2.Book Information:· Paperback: 44 pages · Binding: Perfect-Bound · Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] · ISBN: 978-1-60964-179-5$16
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OXIDANE
NICOLE MATOS
B L A Z E V O X [ B O O K S ] Buffalo, New York
Oxidane by Nicole Matos Copyright © 2014 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza Cover Art by Dennis Sevilla. First Edition ISBN: 978-1-60964-179-5 Library of Congress Number: 2014936384 BlazeVOX [books] 131 Euclid Ave Kenmore, NY 14217 [email protected]
publisher of weird little books
BlazeVOX [ books ] blazevox.org
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1.1 You entered in a conic section. One elbow, the tip, pinched between two steering fingers and a thumb. Not a breech birth, not exactly, like all those other famous champions Caesar and Macbeth and David Copperfield. Born by the foot, born with a caul. You were born at obtuse angles drawn through the scarred plane of that homeroom doorway everted, splayed, almost a Conscientious Objector. It was easy to imagine the dogs upon you your outsteps gently bumping the earth as the secret police dragged you in. She touched you so barely probably that woman because you were so dirty. But that isn’t what we saw. What we saw. So hard to say. But first the elbow steering in, catching us, catching up.
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1.2 Pencil frozen halfway to mouth thirty workbooks rustling she twisted the knob of your elbow unfurled you in that awkward threshold space and left, without even a gesture to an empty seat. There never was an empty seat. Hector and that big kid the one we called Gilgamesh were squeezed in at the radiator and we laid our work on windowsills, crusting the room’s edges when it wasn’t too hot or too cold. I was the one to make room, to claim you. I wheeled and wheeled my hand. Everyone watched. No hatred. There was no way to tell you there was nothing to fear, just the loose momentary engrossment of something new. You were white, or mostly white. Your hair was long, plain, it split in locks in the front, but the back seemed some sort of fuzzed semi-solid. Pointillist, your dirt, the dandruff that sifted, the freckles.
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1.3 Everything in that classroom happened in pantomime. Nothing would be questioned as long as there was quiet, solemn and total and some denomination of worksheets at the end of our mutual time. I stood up, backed up some steps, and made the grandest motion I could. My seat, take it, pointing, pointing. You reacted at last, you had no choice. You walked your steps and sat down. And startled by my own magnificence, I looked around and not seeing a solution sat down at your feet on the floor, crosslegged, too. They laughed at me when I did it only a little, a quick raining patter and only at me, my love, not ever at you.
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1.4 So you entered, elbow-first, like a lever a unit of possible labor an inclination between Tacey and me. “You shouldn’t have done that,” she said to me, sotto voce while your elbow, naked, speckled, beautiful waited ahead, still alone at lunch, for a ticket to trade for a tray. “We might have had a chance,” she said and in her tone was genuine regret. No further action: Tacey said we should Observe. It was her Method: using all five senses to take you in. If we were going to take you in. The fateful question. Seeing was easy. We could see you —that has already been established— but it took Tacey to notice your farsightedness: “See the way she’s pop-eyed? Her eyes are exaggerated. Most glasses make eyes look smaller.” But why then were your glasses so cloudy, the lenses almost lemonade? Small scuffs over and over? Scrubbing them against concrete? Scraping over sand? I cleaned my own glasses in compulsive solidarity huffing and rubbing, until Tacey made me stop.
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1.5 Tasting you was, of course, the hardest. You refused with surprise more than suspicion, itself an empirical result the gift of a cigarette, when we cornered you in the courtyard. I had hoped to share in your saliva to see if it would match the sour that Tacey reported on your breath. In the end, I tasted your hair. It wasn’t too hard to sit behind you in some interminable class, to lift a tendril, the very end. From the neck down your hair was, in fact, in strands, teeming and separate; it was only the section against your scalp matted like a melted toupee. You had no feeling there at the ends, like normal hair, when I touched it to my tongue. It tasted of dish soap. And to this day, when I do the dishes, before I rinse, I lift a glass, a bowl, a saucer to my lips, and I drink you back in.
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1.6 “I think she is a feral child.” This was the end result of our investigations. No shame in that. Some people get made on purpose their parents taking temperatures and tests all in the service of getting them here while the rest of us are born without a meaningful sequence. Throw-away people. The units that made us just bobbling around, shimmering in and out of focus. Driving a car, eating corn on the cob. Crying for unknown reasons late at night. Smelling like successively different colognes. Patting, once in a while, surprisingly, our arms. We followed you home, just to be sure nobody had made you, nobody important. To be sure you were available to be made by us.
