Livestream

Abstract

Livestream Matthew Tuckner (bio) Yellowstone National Park I watch schools of salmon lend themselves with pleasure to the mouths of grizzly bears when everything that's supposed to sit circled quietly around me starts shouting, the fat brick of hash I told my friend not to let me keep, not even if I kowtow at the knees for it, the pair of garish rotisserie chickens peppered with rosemary gossiping in the fridge, the little stipples of spinach I bestow gorgeous honorifics upon before they're sluiced from my teeth & swept down the drain. It's when the video teems, buffers, & leaps forward in time, losing time as it moves, that I misplace the bear I had come to love for the way she carries what remains of the fish after they've been fleeced of meat notched in her auburn fur like gaudy opals. Falling for [End Page 19] how she lumbered & caterwauled, lifting her snout to goad whatever wind the river carried with it, I felt myself, much like the thin-beaked heron entering the water without breaking the water, shocked at how easily I can sneak through this life. The dolly cants the camera & the camera cants my eye past the blotch of vetch blurred on the shoreline, yards beyond the center of the lens, just another perennial I'd find listing & losing its color in my mother's garden. Foraging for my bear by the strings of bone that bangle the thick muscles of her wrists, I wonder what the lens would find if it spun around & racked its focus: the way I bump my snout up against a big green button when it's feeding time, how I lick my coat until it sparkles & I can finally purr myself to sleep. When I was kept in a cage because I couldn't gather language to cradle the reasons I wanted to leap into the mouth of a beast that would catch & destroy me, my mother sent missives repeating be good & don't die, among other dreadful spondees. [End Page 20] When the lock was unlatched, & a clear, blue sky pinned my pupils, I should've been better, I will get better, I still say, a sentence I scan for its stresses, finding nothing but my plain as bone sadness. It would be wise to ape the species of duck I don't know the name of, that floats past the bears it confuses for hills, hopscotches between slipstreams of blood, ducks its bill below the surface, & slides down the long arc of a waterfall. I push my face flush against the screen to glimpse the better place it's tumbled to when a window pops up & tells me I can have twenty more minutes, but only if I pay for it. [End Page 21] Matthew Tuckner Matthew Tuckner is a writer from New York. He is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at NYU where he is Poetry Editor of Washington Square Review and teaches in the Undergraduate Writing Program. He is the recipient of a University Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and was a finalist for the inaugural Prufer Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Colorado Review, The Missouri Review, Bennington Review, Bat City Review, Image, New Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, and Sixth Finch, among others. Copyright © 2022 Pleiades and Pleiades Press