John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978)

I believe it was after they got rid of the cocaine
but before the pandemic aluminum shortage
that the Coca-Cola company invented Santa Claus
I remember it because it was that one summer
when I watched Halloween 
five times a day just to learn what it means
to be a walking shape in a town that doesn’t want you

a Twitter DM asks me what it’s like
to be the only intersex poet on Earth
and I say how can I be the only anything
when we are all just here to fill each other’s bodies up
with whatever our births could not
when there are millions of us
who don’t even know they are us

I’ve been told the worst poems
are the ones turning us into spokespeople
well then where have all the good poems gone

TV English

each time a twang of hill talk 
falls thru my teeth, 

a nielsen rating 
gets its spike.

cable television colonized
the mountain mouths

and sold them to hollywood 
as exploitive pedagogy,

as if we hadn’t already 
started abandoning our tongues

the first time
joey and the boys

called us dumb hicks
in the lunchroom.

but now the cowboys 
sound like new yorkers,

the new yorkers sound like gone,
and the gone sounds like air.

Matt Mitchell is intersex as fuck in Columbus, Ohio. He wrote The Neon Hollywood Cowboy (Big Lucks, 2021), Grown Ocean (word west, 2021), and tweets @matt_mitchell48.