Matt Prater

Tipton Poetry Journal – Summer 2021

Remote Sketches

Matt Prater

No. Much good happens after midnight. The first birds are out in the cool air singing, and the worms burrow under the may apples, and to the light of one candle mystics do silence. Sex is good, too, and long beers lined with mosquitoes, and the smell of rotting chicken livers at a night fish. Someone is reading the last chapters of a dystopia under a flashlight, about to churn strange dreams. Boats come into the harbor, and fry cooks clean and bakeries begin their day and the stock crew slips on their headphones and lines up ketchup. Newspapers burn through the regional printers and are shipped out to chain convenience stores, where cops and 3-11s and designated drivers assemble to trade coffee and condoms and hangover cure-alls. Some people sleep well, and some who don’t turn to a T.D. Jakes sermon and hear the call to call their mother tomorrow, call back Jesus, go into to work tomorrow, give two weeks and finally answer their calling. Some others turn on Bob’s Burgers or Welcome Back, Kotter, remember the bottled coffee drink they’d saved in the fridge, and watch cartoons for a while with mocha and pot. The house settles. The air settles. The road cools off. New lovers touch finger to finger, nestling down in the wide expanse of her soft California king bed. A mother gets a respite from her mothering, and for a slow hour on a starlit deck plucks a ukulele to the rhythm of her clattering dypsis. Someone dies, but dies well, quiet and expectedly, with the last thing they were awake for their child kissing them on the forehead after turning off Jeopardy.

Matt Prater is a writer and visual artist from Saltville, Virginia. Currently a PhD student in Comparative Studies at Florida Atlantic University, his work has appeared in Forklift, Ohio; The Moth; Little Patuxent Review, and Appalachian Review, among other publications.