Matthew Klane

A Dark Alley

There’s a theater nightclub where we go to wait out the hurricanes. Decadent buffet, drinks, and a different show in every room. One of the rooms hosts a 1920s night, but it’s just one annoying guy mansplaining his favorite old movie and lecturing us on “the nuances of the times.” Nevertheless, me and my troupe return to this club every night, often being comically chased there by the bumbling 1920s police. The nights are foggy and the streets are like movie sets. We always make it to the theater nightclub just in time. As we pass, this last time, the camera pans to a dark alley where a man in a wolf costume is waiting to give us the stick-up.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

I find a seat high up in the centerfield bleachers. I’m in a baseball field-shaped gymnasium for a screening of the original Star Wars. I haven’t seen it in a while and am nervously curious how sexist and racist it’s going to be. When the movie starts, the Millennium Falcon flies in and touches down before me on the gym floor. The guy next to me keeps whispering to the person next to him: “Raiders of the Lost Ark! Raiders of the Lost Ark! Raiders of the Lost Ark!”

Badlands

Working a case out here in the environmental badlands. Children are disappearing. In the car, scanning the landscape as she drives, my partner says, “It would be nearly impossible to survive out here for very long.” Someone from the church gives us “city-folk” a tour of the landfills. I get the sense that we’re being followed. At the church orphanage, no one will give us an interview. Doors keep shutting everywhere we go. I left sheets around with climate facts and details about the missing kids, but now the sheets themselves are missing. The bad guy appears a few seconds at a time. He has tight curly hair and a bowling pin shape like a clown with no makeup on. How do I know he’s the bad guy? I say, “If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck… it’s a duck.”

The Death of Print Journalism

Looking like the Supreme Court, a panel of black-robed and bearded national sportscasters are grieving the death of print journalism. The first one just finished his saccharine commentary. Down the line, they’re all men, all crying. Near the end, a thick-spectacled blue-haired young woman reads “The Raven.”

The Fool

I thought I was the star of this sci-fi drama until the perspective shifts. The fool Tony Bologna spasms and disappears before our eyes. Back from commercial, he’s in a field, in the future of the future, walking with a caravan of peasants. Trying to impress the women, he declares, “It is I, Tony Bologna, who now walks among you. The oldest man on Earth!” 

Place Your Bets

The person next to me is taking bets on how much sleep I got tonight, how much deep sleep, how many times I woke up, how much noise I made in the night. He assures me that I’m allowed, if I want, to place bets with him myself.


Learn more about these poems.

Matthew Klane has an MA in Poetics from SUNY Buffalo and an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His books of poetry include Hist (w/ James Belflower, Calamari 2022), Canyons (w/ James Belflower, Flimb Press 2016), Che (Stockport Flats 2013) and B (Stockport Flats 2008). An e-chapbook from Of the Day is online at Delete Press and an e-book My is online at Fence Digital. He is co-founder of Flim Forum Press and currently co-curator of Salon Salvage, a poetry and performance series inside of Weathered Wood in downtown Troy, NY. See: www.matthewklane.com.