Matthew Tuckner

Elegy with Balls of Neptune Grass

It is Sunday & I have still never seen / a hippopotamus
there’s a bird outside my window that sounds
like an oboe / I’m not sure I can tell the difference
between an oboe & what apes an oboe / my grandmother
is intubated a few states away / her heart
is functioning at a quarter of its full
capacity / today I learned something new / the lifecycle of
the Neptune grass bryozoan / is synchronized
with the growth cycle of the seagrass / on which it lives / I feel better
for knowing this / it feels like true love / balls of Neptune grass
wash up on nearby shorelines / the doctor says my grandmother feels nothing
but my sister is singing her / Hallelujah
over the phone / a song my grandmother listened to every day / days
in which she felt many things / the word no broadening
a pair of lips / wafts of seabreeze / the particular sadness
of green olives / I have nothing new to say
about oxygen / it’s what ties the sadness of the olives
to my sadness / in the course of my cataloguing what I don’t
know / my grandmother has died / my father is using the word edema
on the phone / like it means something / edema means
to swell / passed away is the phrase
the doctors delicately maneuver around / I have taken days for this
it is Monday / I take days & sever them / in pieces / with meals
the article the / does very little for me / it just points
to the next thing / knows
what I’m going to say before I say it / Susan Sontag also died
on December 28th / there is no the / in the body
of that statement / Susan Sontag wrote she discovered
she was tired / of being a person / I am happy
that she no longer has to be / any kind of person
at all / when my father said the word edema
I thought the words green olives / what does this say
about grief / what do green olives denote / I have never seen
a ball of Neptune grass / I could write a book
with all of the things I’ve never seen / at the funeral
my sister plays Hallelujah again / this time it’s a recording
the sound of the birds overhead / overpower the sound / of her singing
I like it this way / the direction they are going is far away from here
& that means something / what does it mean / I have yet to master augury
when I put a green olive in my mouth / I don’t feel sad
I feel close to nothing / I swell with the nothing / sometimes
the world / plays me like an oboe / sometimes
the world tongues my reeds / and blows me away
I have still never seen a hippopotamus / I don’t think
my grandmother did either / I never asked

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Matthew Tuckner is a writer from New York. He received his BA from Bennington College and is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at NYU where he is Assistant Poetry Editor of Washington Square Review. He received the Green Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets, selected by Rick Barot. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Sixth Finch, Poetry Northwest, The Massachusetts Review, New South and Tupelo Quarterly, among others.