Margo Perin
  • Home
  • About
  • Pubs & Music
    • Plexiglass
    • The Opposite of Hollywood
    • Only the Dead Can Kill
    • How I Learned to Cook
    • essays & poetry >
      • Unholy Mother
      • The Body Geographic
      • How to Deal with Aggression - Or Not
      • Broken
      • Why Can't We All Get Along?
      • I Hate Poetry
      • Wishes
      • Mapmaker
      • Entropy
      • Physics
      • Why are the Lilacs Still Here
      • Best Buy
      • I See You
      • Delivery
      • They Say
      • Spider
      • Accessories for the Apocalypse
      • From My Heart
      • Untitled
      • Morning News
    • Music
  • Community Projects
    • Whoa Nelly Press
    • Spiral of Gratitude
    • Poetry Workshop
    • Write & Rise
  • Press
  • Classes/Editing
  • Contact
Physics
​from When a Lion is Chasing You, a collection of poetry
In response to a student at San Francisco County Jail setting an assignment to see whether I walked my talk about writing from the “underneath” of experience. On a torn off piece of paper, handed to me when I passed his desk, was written in meticulous handwriting: “From your deeper self, what is your incentive to help others write about what is underneath?” ​​​

I too am America, wrote Langston Hughes
Yes, says Matthew who insists on my calling him
Mr. Matthew though his real name isn’t Matthew
With a fake name and no ID card
He lives in the shadows where matter does not matter
Except the matter that allows him to eat sometimes
And shut off the pain always
 
Men locked up behind bars
Invisible anti-matter
Not part of society they are told
As if society is the home that never was
The parents who never were
Throwing them out on the street
Where they would cease to matter
Or be matter
 
Yes, says Mr. Matthew who really isn’t
We are part of corporate America
The bodies that feed the prison industry
But he says it too quickly like he heard it somewhere
And I can see that he believes that he is not matter
Because he does not matter
A disposable commodity with no disposable income
 
Mr. Matthew and José and Daniel and Ravi
Make sure they matter
Rob steal rape kill
No one’s going to forget me
Catch me if you can
 
I’m only in for a parole violation
Ravi tells me as if he does matter
And he does, whether he is lying or not
He wants to matter to me
And that makes me matter
 
Daniel says he robs for the thrill of getting away with it
Being smarter than, like my father too
Who taught me to play chess and when I started winning
Stopped playing with me and went on to steal from my mother
Breaking in through a window
Collecting the jewelry he had given her
The wedding ring she no longer wore
The gold band with six birthstones of their children
The seventh never added
Because my sister did not matter
Any more than we did
By then not worth the jeweler’s fee

When I met my father’s family
And found out who he was
He disappeared around the corner
Just like my students.
I knew he was matter
But not Jewish matter
A shock
considering how anti-Semitic he was
 
I used to think we were one
My sisters and brothers and I
As if all our stories were the same
I felt like I did not matter
In the matter that was them
 
By separating from their stories
And weaving together the strands of my own
I suddenly see I matter
I am not just part of the mix
The way my students feel
Skulking along Dolores Park
or the Tenderloin
Unseen untended unknown
 
I was not matter
When I peed at a bus stop at thirteen
Standing fully clothed
I had to go and there was nowhere to go
The bystanders did not blink or stare
I was a wisp of air
Floating past their frozen cheeks
Between Glasgow’s sandstone buildings
Black from soot
 
Inside the two-story house
Where my sister hung from the window
a painting of a man screaming help, face outwards
And I sat in the bathroom and scratched my arm
To feel I could feel
My father put his hands around my neck
Being caught in the air even by my neck
Was a relief as we floated from place to place
Swimming in a gray sea of invisibility
 
Later in a starched white hospital bed
Out the window the bland green hills of Surrey
On one side the stone-laden cemetery
The other a brick-walled mental hospital
It’ll be one or the other
The women in the ward and I laughed
As if it did not matter
While we fought to keep our matter
 
Later still when it should have mattered
And it did
My mother said Don’t call me Mom
When I ran into her at a movie theater and said Hi …!
It did not matter that I was happy to see her
I had not seen her for a while
And forgot in the slip of an instant
That she did not matter
Or it would not have mattered
Except that she was my mother
So of course it did matter
Even if she was empty air
Looking like she was matter
 
Now driving by and seeing Ed
Or is it Fred or Tomás
With his street face on
And a new beard
I cannot recognize him
His bone structure is the same
As when I saw him in class
But his expression so different
Selling fake dope
Risking his life
Because he has so little of it left
Never feeling he was or did matter
 
Got a dollar?
A smile to get the fee
And then slinking off
Selling the handouts handed out
From have to have not
Shoes or a take-out dinner or can of Coke
 
Daniel tells me he runs around the corner
And exchanges it for dope
But now that he feels he matters
Because he has woven together
The strands of his own story
The people who give to him matter
 
They matter he matters I matter
No matter which way it goes
It matters, and it does