Matthew Tuckner

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Like the two brains of a cuttlefish
conspiring to mimic a rock, I can
remake you into anything here.

An itchy soul. A conch shell.
A sack of yesterdays I drag past
the border of the retention pond,

the bald dome of the nuclear reactor
cresting above the tufts of flowers
trellised along its roadblocks—

a radiated head robbed of its hair.
I can make you the cuttlebone
filling the cuttlefish with air.

A barn freed of its burdensome owl.
A sexless snowglobe. A dogwood
diapered in horseflies. A dead sun.

I could fold & fashion
your hospice skin into
a lumpy cloud, reassemble

your left nipple as a survivor pea,
a navel orange, a socrates cucumber,
something I could easily crimp

my wordy tongue around,
saying & saying sentences
that point to where it hurts,

fibbing & fibbing until
I birth you, bloody & damp,
back into existence.

You are five hundred years old.
Your mother is a rhinoceros.
You chirp like a pillbug.

In one hand, you are holding
a clutch of atoms, & in the other,
this tulip I’ve built for you.

Matthew Tuckner is a writer from New York. He is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at NYU where he was Poetry Editor of Washington Square Review and taught in the Undergraduate Writing Program. He is the recipient of a University Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the winner of the 2022 Yellowwood Poetry Prize, selected by Paige Lewis. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, The Adroit Journal, 32 Poems, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, Pleiades, West Branch, The Cincinnati Review, The Missouri Review, and Bennington Review, among others.