Looking For Mothman, But Only Finding Air

cosmically flirtatious, I too am sometimes so elusive my own kind forgets me

a similarly bodied vestibule of I believe bumper stickers, but believe in what

the aluminum bug with tits in Point Pleasant’s square or just the idea of it

the pussy in my chromosomes the cock in my poems or just the talk of it

how its spectacularity is so foreign but equally exquisite 

worth a thousand glances and its own museum in somewhere nowhere

no one says a thing about the tits if there’s a photo-op brimming

all the x-rays, polaroids, and selfie gray matter thick as AndroGel

thumb over the lens, get a look at its wings and can you retake that propaganda

yes, I suppose Mothman could be real 

real as all of us, just a bunch of no good nobodies always grasping at light

IN WHICH I ASK THAT BITCHASS JOHN WAYNE TO RUB MY CHROMOSOMAL CLIT

I almost threw myself off the edge of Point Arena 
in front of all my friends,
because in a doorway at the end of The Searchers,
a hollowed Wayne is banished from his home
but called a hero in retrospect.
because every six months, a blood test strokes my pussy
and I become wet with malpractice. 
it’s Wednesday night, and a bulb of testosterone emerges
from the hole in my thigh that a needle just punctured.
it’s alright, I say, I can’t find the clit either.
wherever you are, I hope you come home soon.
who fed us the snake oil that said
TO COME OUT IS TO REMEMBER
HOW JOY FEELS—
because the truth is, here I am. 
and I have never felt so alone.

Matt Mitchell wrote The Neon Hollywood Cowboy (Big Lucks, 2021), Grown Ocean (word west, 2021), and tweets @matt_mitchell48.