after Van Gogh

He is a change in barometric pressure, a clearing storm in strange light. He is
a missed warning, a settled resolve, a thousand-mile stare across the dinner table. He is a truck parked in a cornfield at dawn, an empty cubicle at work. He is the husband of a classmate, father of teen-agers. He is a childhood friend slicing through the crisp, dry, Colorado autumn wind into a flagstone canyon twenty-five stories below: the echoes of our adolescent laughter; the sound of the wing flaps of his demons carrying him off into the gloaming. He is a famous athlete, lonely inside, broken, down a trail in the woods away from the house, among the dappled shade made softer by his decision.

No one hears the reports, or maybe they do: the wife of a neighbor,
upstairs in their bedroom, jolted by the bluntness of the blast muffled
by mouth and lips, hard palette, back wall of skull. The grating silence
of gunpowder smoke swirling like grit through the air over the scene;
the sound of blood made free by the act, pouring out across the kitchen
floor, warm as him. The taste of iron in the stillness. The sharp, slow burn
of rust as the minutes pass slow as eons before the sirens arrive.

Some will speak of the economy, of marriage problems, of failure
or sickness, of dark secrets only the dead held close. They will speak
of subtle signs and actions, of odd shifts, of the day they missed
the calm resolution as he gave his things away.

The left-behind will not speak of the darkness that followed him to the place
where he stopped running. They will not speak of the gravity of crows,
startled from the trees at the edge of an empty field under gunmetal
clouds, scattering away into the distance—cold, black stars
punctuating the morning horizon like terrible ellipses.

Matt Hohner, a Baltimore native, holds an M.F.A. in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. His work has been a finalist for the Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize, taken both third and first prizes in the Maryland Writers Association Poetry Prize, and won the 2016 Oberon Poetry Prize. Hohner’s work has been published individually in numerous journals, including Rattle: Poets Respond, Free State Review, and Crab Orchard Review. His book-length manuscript Thresholds will be published by Apprentice House Press in Fall 2018.

Detail of Sower at Sunset by Vincent van Gogh.

Latin Night, Pulse Nightclub, Orlando, Florida, June 12, 2016

The blood sucks back from the dance floor into his
mouth, into his nose, his body uncrumples and he stands,
the round stops bouncing around inside his cranium,
stops turning his brain to jelly, gray matter pulls and folds
back neatly into his skull through his cheek, skin closing
behind the bullet it as it leaves him, backs through a woman’s
shoulder blade and out of her chest, so fast now, spinning back
into the barrel of the man’s AR-15, explosion of gunpowder
re-condensing as the firing mechanism eases away from the
round, trigger moves forward, finger relaxes, and he walks
backward out of the club into the darkness, opens his trunk,
slides his gun back into its case, un-parks his car and returns
home, walks backward from his car to his apartment door,
slips quietly back into bed, time reverses faster, the sun
unsets for a do-over, he grabs his Quran instead of his gun,
reads Mohammad’s verses on tolerance and grace, his pain
lifting like an azan, calls his father to tell him something he won’t
want to hear, but must, because the sound of a father weeping
for a son who has accepted himself is preferable to the sound
of forty-nine others’ loved ones weeping because their sons
and daughters are now dead, and won’t be coming home
late after dancing the night away at the club ever again.

Matt Hohner, a Baltimore native, holds an M.F.A. in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. His work has been a finalist for the Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize, taken both third and first prizes in the Maryland Writers Association Poetry Prize, and won the 2016 Oberon Poetry Prize. Hohner’s work has been published individually in numerous journals, including Rattle: Poets Respond, Free State Review, and Crab Orchard Review. His book-length manuscript Thresholds will be published by Apprentice House Press in Fall 2018.

Photograph by Orlando Police Department.