Matthew Moniz

Cold Open

We are brutal.

          or

You stand in a restaurant freezer or a grocery
freezer or any one just big enough to get locked
in comfortably. It’s too cold for birdsong, too cold
for scavenging rats and the whimblooded snakes
that swallow them, but you wear layers, bear layers
because the temperature mechanism is built
for preservation, solid state, stagnant lack, ice stasis.
Cold does not exist as its own entity – you
stand within electric inversion of universal dynamics.

          or

Neatly arranged products line these frigid walls–
finest steaks marbled, intentional as sculpture
and just as still, just as sinewed, next to vanilla bean
ice cream from a still-living cow and lesser cuts
of beef, chunks of cow from a cow body’s
less desired domains. If you say the word cow over
and over, you begin to question what a cow even is.
You stumble over sounds. Blunted tongue, numb
static, slack neurons, an unmoving thing hidden
from perception. Cow cow cow – semantic satiation,
saturation, saturnine. Latin for cow was vacca.
Latin for breath is spiritus, and you see yours.
The Romans didn’t have a word for freezer.

          or

We transition to a quickly dropped television conceit
replete with placating narratives. The world moves
by television if we let it, by books if we let it,
by stories, by selves. The programming programming us
preaches verisimilitude, calculated preservation codified
and traditioned with no enduring arcs, just lessons
unlearned in the scrub of credits weekly. Stories teach
us we change in thirty minutes, but more
often we don’t. We retell stories.

          or

Brutality, brutality, et tu.
Fish fish fish, what is a fish in air and solid water–
the same as outdoor statues, wrought or stone
cicada shells left by many pasts making noise
in their cold hollows. Pile them up in double helix,
spiral staircase to thinner air, and climb until after life
enacts time’s violence upon us all.
See scales as balance, scale as scope, scales as a body’s barrier.

          or

Understanding is fluid
as blood washes the brain.

          or

Right-angle stainless shelves hold sharply sliced
bodies within their industrial capacity for paltry
poultry, among hummingbird eggs which cannot
even hold a fingerprint without spiderweb splintering
and barrels of salted pork filled with many pig pig pigs,
with the rare platypus as self-contained omelet provider
and tubs all gristle and gravy. See snowflake flechettes
severing tendons after steel has done the same. Across
it all, see the silver binding of ice as dewskins harden
into gossamer white of six-fingered water with six-
winged bite, a constellation of frost shivering like distant
stars whose heat cannot travel with the sole
strings of light that find our eyes.

          or

Bodies crave the heat of other bodies or the pressure
of a humid dawn. Heat rises. Cold sinks into your gut–
but not your blood muscle. A stomach which can’t replenish
its lining will consume itself, but meals meld in bellies, leftover
specks in kitchen sinks. Watch the flakes become round as,
overture over, the freezer door unshutters and falls ajar.

Matthew Moniz teaches English in Mississippi. Originally from the DC area, Matt has poems appearing in or forthcoming from The Iowa Review, Notre Dame Review, Grist, Crab Orchard Review, Meridian, Tupelo Quarterly, Fourteen Hills, and minnesota review. His work has been awarded Poetry by the Sea’s Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Crown Contest prize and the SCMLA Poetry Prize.