Nathan Spoon
Two Poems
Winter Sunlight
This morning, when I rose from a night of sleeping,
there was a giant in my orange and a yeti in my cereal.
There was also a werewolf in my coffee. I am not even
kidding when I say that there was a terrible creature,
all bulbous and scaly, hunkered beside me and growling
painfully as I stood at the sink alone brushing my teeth.
Nobody likes a monster. There I was surrounded by
so many it would have been impossible to chase them
off. So I climbed into the seat of my car and drove
to the office where I work. Along the way I dropped
several chimeras clustered in the backseat off, as they
each had places to go and people to afflict despite how
I was not the Uber driver they had mistaken me for.
There were no harpies crashing my workday, for which
I am thankful, even though I signed a few birthday
cards to members of my department I do not yet know.
I ate lunch alone, which was fine, as it gave me time to
begin writing a poem. People like poems that I write
in the middle of doing something more important or,
at least arguably, more necessary. I was listening to
Good Morning, Captain by Slint as I searched for a place
to put a pin in what I was not saying. My hands were
practically floating over the innocence of my keyboard
as I wondered was I drifting in or out of another dream?
Until
We | thought the most viable monster was
as unknowable as unnamable. When
we saw it consuming the tender hearts of art
we shivered and cried out in horror. The monster,
in all its immense grotesquery, was ourselves
and the hearts being eaten belonged, for all the ways
they were sweating through our files, to each
of us. We were | alive with a need for seeing
our own harmonies deepen by becoming somehow
more real. The proof was in the depth of love we held
for one another. Was it possible to meet a monster
both namable and knowable. We didn’t know.
We were grateful for mindsets extending their safety
throughout our lives at what baffling turns they could.
Nathan Spoon is an autistic poet with learning disabilities and low academic fluency whose poems have appeared in the publications Poetry, Mantis, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Scores, Oxford Poetry, The South Carolina Review, and elsewhere. His debut collection, Doomsday Bunker, was published in 2017. He is editor of Queerly.