Matt W. Miller is the author of four poetry collections: Tender the River (2021), Club Icarus, selected as the 2012 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize winner; Cameo Diner; and The Wounded for the Water. A recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, among other honors, he teaches English and coaches football at Phillips Exeter Academy in coastal New Hampshire.

Graduated

by Matt W. Miller

Another disposable medical mask
drying in the June sun after all

the ceremonies are done and all
the families have gone lifts


just a bit in a building breeze
and looks for a second like a lip


snarling in that flirting way you see
the tattooed girls snarl and then it


flips over to bare a white belly
smudged brown with breath and so


becomes a wounded moth flittering
across the road floats on to become


a banner thrown from a tower falling
out of myth rolls over and over until


it is a single eye trying to blink out
a bug or just the dust of what’s coming


Read on . . .

“Oh Father, Your Fear,” a poem by Matt W. Miller