POETRY BY MATT MITCHELL

GROWING UP, WEST VIRGINIA WAS NOTHING BUT LISTENING TO ELVIS & SWIMMING IN COMMUNITY POOLS

& it wasn’t until i read beloved in college that i understood what

my third cousin meant when she called me a dead child

at the grafton community pool

because she must have caught me staring at that morgantown boy

as we traded cannonballs into the four foot shallow end

the impact of our coiled legs leaving reverberations in the water

my aunt yelling god killed that child to my father 

as i hugged the boy near the concession stand too long

the way i looked for him every subsequent summer

& he never came back

Matt Mitchell is an intersex writer from Warren, Ohio trying to make his work as beautiful as “Keep On Loving You” by REO Speedwagon, the quintessential pop banger. He has a music column, “Timefighters & Unbelievers: Illustrated Essays on Music & Identity” in Flypaper Lit and is a member of the Northeast Ohio poetry group Sad Kids Superhero Collective. His chapbook, you & me & the pink moon & these portraits, is out with Ghost City Press. He also has poems in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Drunk Monkeys, and BARNHOUSE, among others