The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The word of the day is chasm.
They are few & far apart, the hours.
In the mall, cars for sale: a guppy, a carisma.
Indebted to the state, I stir fry the fiddleheads.
An egg yolk. A brainstorm. Sixty Novembers, or so.
The sun nodding off against the roof of the condo complex.
I wish to defer the inevitable. I lack the language for it.
Augenblick. A split second. A very short moment.
Tomorrow, the world will be what exactly.
Noise & its toddlers. Picnics in Wichita.
A grassy skull punctuated with laughter.
Something I have everything to do with.
Parasitic wasps, the removal of mountaintops.
Ambient pain in my ankle, I stir fry the pork shoulder.
The word of the day is pulverize.
The word of the day is bleat.
I put a coin in the meter. I eat the meat.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
We are pushing up against
Something denser than air
The yoga instructor
Intones to her GoPro
As I contort my bones into
The Half Lord of the Fishes
Stretching the limits of
Muscles brimming with atoms
Fuzzy clouds of electrons
Jumbles of dots connected
By lines of terrible feeling
To other jumbles of dots
In bodies running low on time
We fold into baffling shapes
The One-Legged King Pigeon
The Happy Baby
Tunneling further inward
Breathing away the hours
Systems of stars born as
Collapsing balls of gas
That spin faster & faster
As they shrink
Matthew Tuckner is a writer from New York. He received his MFA from New York University and is currently a PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at University of Utah. His debut collection of poems, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in Fall 2025. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, The Adroit Journal, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, West Branch, and Poetry Daily, among other journals.