gone the red poppies
from the hands of veterans
greeting me outside a walmart.

gone the poppies
into my chapped hands
& then onto the parking lot,

where their thin paper skins linger
in the hot tar.

it’s wednesday & daniel johnston is dead.
i know this because each building looks small.

a car hit a robin as i was crossing the street,
its feathers sticky with red.

daniel went to the kent state university branch
not far from where i grew up.

today, people say you can taste his ghost
cooked into the lake-washed air.

the ohio turnpike hisses like his orchestra.

i once graffiti’d the inside of someone’s house
with true love will find you in the end in red spray paint
before going back to my own home & catching myself
disappearing from the photographs on my shelves.

my spine is full of feathers.
i cough the ticker-tape out of my lungs.

lips can say so many things:

today, it’s goodbye.

yesterday, it was hi, how are you.

Matt Mitchell is a writer from Ohio. His work appears in, or is forthcoming to, venues like The Shallow Ends, NPR, Homology Lit, BARNHOUSE, Frontier Poetry, Empty Mirror, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among others.