Toy Gun

By Matt Coonan

In Toy Gun, Matt fires his offbeat childhood and adolescence at the page. He enters each exit wound with sharp diction and form, extracting shards of trauma, mental health, and evolutionary violence. What you’ll find in this collection is ambitious anaphora—an attempt to explain the irrationality of an obsessive mind by imitation. The result of it all? Raw candor dripped on the backdrop of New York suburbia; an intimacy that lingers from backyard barbeques to funeral homes.

You do not want to miss this searing debut.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Button Poetry
• Release date: Aug 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781638340812

Matt Coonan

Matt Coonan is a poet, emcee & teacher from New York. He holds an MFA in creative writing and literature from Stony Brook University and is a three-time SUNY Oneonta Grand Slam Champion. He is also the recipient of a 2017 Live Mas Scholarship. His poems have been featured on Button Poetry and published in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Southampton Review, Inklette, amongst others. Matt is also a vocalist in the improvisational jazz band Bright Dog Red. Their fifth studio album, Under the Porch, released May 20th, 2022 from Ropeadope Records.

Book preview

I

But I knew it could not come back—the cry of absence in the afternoon, the house that waited and the child that dreamed.

—Thomas Wolfe

A REWOUND CATHARSIS

Tell me the tale of

a chrysalis cracked early,

& how high fluid will soar

when tongues flap

a manic rhythm.

Call me a field of

mechanical hum.

The garden of madness

eating its own bloom.

& I think privilege

feels like the absence of bone

pressed against a throat,

or the tulips that a storm

can’t crook, & the air

that loiters despite us.

A swarm of monarchs

rise in a king’s gut.

How much gold will

he shed to float today

& gain a bug’s eye view

of the lopsided cage he’s built?

SALON ODYSSEY

My legs dangle

by stacks of Star magazines

while Cher’s contralto

battles a hair dryer.

Years before

iPhone, but days after

the dog cracked

my Game Boy screen,

I’m left with a scowl

& the important work

of waiting,

which is to fold

& unfold a moment

until its creases crave tear,

to stitch & unstitch,

Penelope-like,

as unmanned ships crash

against my bottom jaw.

Mom’s thirty-minute promise

is curling gray, &

I can feel something

inside me say run.

While the door’s open.

Like Dudley did

before a Nissan

sent him back limping.

Maybe they’ll milk

carton my mug & staple

flyers over less important

flyers, & once the search dies

down, my mother will have

nothing left to dye.

Nothing left for her

to do but wait

on the park bench

& picture my small body

struggling

across monkey bars

as the terminal air

grows vellus hair.

PLAYDATE

His mom

blows him a kiss.

Mine pierces

our Capri Suns.

We become brothers

after school,

scattered across the acre

my father groomed,

spilling our soft parts

like fertilizer,

like overstuffed bird feeders

bullied by the wind.

An oak spits her kids

to the dirt.

We beat out

the squirrels & blue jays

to cram our pockets

with acorns.

Our eyes lock,

& today,

we will bare

our fathers’ bark,

trade this petal skin

for decades of callus.

Shells crack beneath

our Sketchers like the skulls

of weak Spartan boys.

Those whose first word

was not war.

I cock one back

& peg his chest.

He retaliates

with a fistful

of fetal trees.

They semi-auto burst

against my fleece,

& I bet

the battlefields

of forgotten men

are forests now.

I bet the robins

gather phalanges

& cracked ribs

to cradle their young.

I hurl a fat one

at his bucktooth grin.

It leaves my hand

a seed,

enters him

a stone,

& shatters his left incisor

which never grows back.

Nothing grows from stone.

They planted one above Nonna

& Arty

& Alex

& I’m still waiting