Photographers Unknown, In Strings of Is and Os

I have been here since on other dates but it’s your ghost
still hausts this place. Or should I say duppy?
Can duppies cross the wide Sargasso sea?
or are they bound by the roots of the Banyan tree?

I won’t lie. A Jamaican ache. You seduced me
before you knew me, reading from a blank
sheet or receipt the words scared in that space
behind iris and cornea. And days later

when we met, when my boot heels clicked down those steps,
when
the March air blew me through that door, I gave
a wave to your perched chair. You would later
recount your disbelief to Richard that the man

who wrote you, who you thought a kindly old gentle
man, was an anagram and rhyme. Come now.
Did you really think me other than those
words you surely googled? I do not remember

what we drank, but I remember the direction
the wood grains went–yes I knew Erna’s work,
I studied with Lorna, and Walcott’s knot
was a year of my life. That landscape long dormant

woke again in me that night, your accent a chant,
your eyes brinning with island light, your skin
a song on my lips. Started, we parted
on opposite sides of the tracks, you Brooklyn-bound

me, Queens. I knew you, but not convinced of bamboo
clues I missed the hint, lint trapped in lucite.
The modern courting of email ensued,
the story of your name, our chat-box-poems exchanged

in strings of Is and Os. And that April surprise
to come home to find dew on my bed. Hi.
Hello. Hues conjured. There for me? For you?
for something we both felt and knew needed to bloom?

Matthew Hittinger, “71 Irving Place”, Smite and Spoon Project, 2017

Born in 1978 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Matthew Hittinger is a poet and a printmaker. He earned his BFA in English and Art History at Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg College in 2000 and his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan in 2004. Hittinger is married to Michael Ernst Sweet, a Canadian writer, educator, and photographer known for his oddly-framed street photography.

Hittinger is the author of the poetry collections “The Masque of Marilyn, The Erotic Postulate” and “Skin Shift”, which , in 2012, earned him recognition as a Debut Poet from Poets & Writers Magazine. He has also written three chapbooks: the 2007 “Pear Slip”,  winner of the 2006 Spire Press Chapbook Award, and two volumes published in 2009, “Narcissus Resists” and “Platos de Sal”.

Matthew Hittinger received the Helen S. and John Wagner Prize from the University of Michigan, the Kay Deeter Award from the literary journal “Fine Madness”, two Best of the Net nominations from Sundress Publications, and eleven nominations from the literary Pushcart Prize. His work has appeared on the web poetry anthology “Verse Daily” and in over fifty journals including American Letters & Commentary, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and StepAway Magazine, an award-winning online literary magazine. Hittinger’s work has also been featured in The Academy of American Poets.

Matthew Hittinger has also collaborated on projects with artists of other disciplines, such as the Canadian painter Kristy Gordon, American painter Judith Peck, composer Randall West, and New York City-based John Glover. Glover’s art song based on Hittinger’s poem “8:46 AM, Five Years Later” was included in the 2012 Five Borough Songbook, a book celebrating the five New York boroughs’ music festival.

Matthew Hittinger’s website is located at: https://matthewhittinger.com