on “Right Down The Line,” Gerry Rafferty making love sound uncrappy
whether you’re ten with a fresh copy of City To City in your hands
or forty-five with your two daughters bored in the backseat;
you feel helpless as the station starts to slip
into static, last lines of the song in and out,
oil pumps and grain towers, cassettes you forgot
how they broke after too many plays,
unspooling deep
inside your bones.
Space Mountain
gets tough to get to in the belly of the day, but when the Sun goes snuff and the parade lights up, you sprint the whole line, rockets waiting for you like a valet roller coaster again and again, scream through the stars, bolt out the exit, shoot back through the queue, arms half-raised, the galaxy’s ecstatic breath against your face.
Disneyland, 2018
Sophia hasn’t left the hotel room. All of you, in slow motion, day by day have blossomed into cough, sniffle, groan, in the pains, have pondered, should it get worse, the uncertainties of airline and hotel and park ticket change foibles.
You’re at Disneyland and Sophia does homework from the classes she’s missing. The horror.
Lucia, nine, throat went wrong days before you left, wobbled off balance, recovered just in time to be the only functional one here, your wife staring through you all as if you are ghosts, you hoping that these feelings are not about vomit (It is sadness to acknowledge that if one eats anything shaped like Mickey’s head, there will be repercussions).
Lucia dances, she is the generator who could juice all of Space Mountain and more, she asks questions, bounces bed to floor to bed to floor, the sinus behind your right eye slowly cracking the shell of your skull;
your wife stares, small twitch and sigh,
you feel like the poison apples in the Happiest Place on Earth, the ones who bring this all down.
MATT MASON is the Nebraska State Poet and Executive Director of the Nebraska Writers Collective. He has run poetry programs for the State Department in Nepal, Romania, Botswana and Belarus. Mason is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and his work can be found in The New York Times, on NPR’s Morning Edition, and in American Life in Poetry. Mason's 4th poetry collection, At The Corner of Fantasy and Main: Disneyland, Midlife and Churros, is due out from The Old Mill Press this spring. Matt is based out of Omaha with his wife, the poet Sarah McKinstry-Brown, and daughters Sophia and Lucia.
