Assistant Editor Haley Crigger: “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” set in Rome, New York, is just one gem in Tuckner’s series of poems by the same title. The series is a fresh, haunting exploration of what lies between generations: unsettling gulfs carved out by time, by the State, by chance. This particular poem, featured below, leapt out at us for its explosive ironies: menstrual blood in a mausoleum; Agent Orange over an Irresist-A-Bowl; the champagne of beers. Every moment of this couple’s afternoon (including two trips to the bathroom) is awash in the dark humor of late-stage capitalism, but their love, it seems, remains untouched by its cynicism. To hear Matt read his poem, click below:
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Rome, NY
As we pass through the rows of graves, some slanted with age, others upright with the crisp texture of the just born, you fondle the CVS bag with the two tests the box promises are bestowed with the faulty accuracy of anything that can predict the future. We inspect your tampon, saturated with rusty blood, in a bathroom converted from the ruins of a mausoleum. You insist the splotches are shaped like the heads of German shepherds, yet when I look, I only see the blank faces of stopped clocks. Closer to the fluorescent light, maybe an evergreen tree. We agree to disagree. Skipping half-relieved over the bones of the man who penned the Pledge of Allegiance, you say you would’ve named it after one of Jupiter’s moons.
*
At Applebee’s we drink the champagne of beers, while the old man at the bar describes how to quiet the rattle of a gun rack with bifurcated baseballs. He mentions the gout in his toe, the disease of kings, how Agent Orange left him unable to bear a son. I’m heirless, he laments, fumbling with his chicken Irresist-A-Bowl. Excusing ourselves to the sweaty bathroom stall, we collate our bodies together because we can, because we have these endless limbs at our service, these time bombs in our chests. Placing my pinky finger in your mouth, you threaten to bite clean through it. We will stumble into the future like this. Tallying the plastic bags as they drift by on the canal. Counting the Confederate flags at Ron’s Bargain Barn as we learn how to hack up a diseased tree into useful pieces of lumber.
Matthew Tuckner is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at New York University. He was the winner of the 2022 Yellowwood Poetry Prize, selected by Paige Lewis. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, The Adroit Journal, 32 Poems, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, Pleiades, West Branch, Nashville Review, Missouri Review, and Bennington Review, among others.
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