The Understudy
i.
Stuttering and cluttering
in front of a blank wall,
I spent so much time rehearsing
the words to avoid ire.
I always liked watching my brother
learning to walk. I’d stumble less
when I followed: I wanted to measure up.
If, as the analysts say, the body
is a kind of speech, mine
was silent, aberrant, needing
direction. So when you thrust
your hips against mine
at the first bar we ever went to,
it was only my old error,
mistaking a shadow for a mirror.
ii.
On mornings when the house
was somehow empty
and summer hummed,
I felt I had stolen something,
but I didn’t know what.
I practiced straightening my back,
my arms, spitting up in the air
like a boy, making the facial expressions
that would allow me to hide.
Alone on the playground at school,
the sun an uneasy nurse,
I imagined a future version of you
at a friend’s wedding, maybe,
throwing flowers at my face.
Outside the bar, rain dirtying us,
I knew you saw me—
saw through me.
You, like most people
when I was young, could not
accept what you saw.
iii.
By the pond crusted with lichen,
I wandered to tire my bones
so I might sleep through
a dream you would not enter,
a stone in my throat
as I kicked grass. I waded in,
frail pieces of the forest
falling, plunking in water.
Autumn wielded its long knife
to the frills of rhododendrons.
I realized so much of life
would be this: small bargainings
with my quietest self. In a few days,
back in our city, you would harp
on my stubbornness, my dependency.
I was so at home there, not
in the shape I was as I maundered
through the pond, but in that slow
ripple of water, an outline I followed.
iv.
Your softness so much like a boy’s,
your indifference a man’s—
in the thin aster of your sleeping hours
I could finally imagine us back in the alley,
you pushing me against the bricks
until I was red all over, October
making one continuous thread
of our tongues. In a video I took
at sixteen, among roses in the Tuileries,
the camera lens was so smudged
you could barely see the colors.
You don’t listen, my theater teacher said,
You are always somewhere else in your mind.
But when she asked me to repeat her instructions
I remembered every word.
Matthew Gellman’s first book, Beforelight, won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published by BOA Editions in 2024. His second book, The Understudy, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2027. He is a Ph.D. student at the University of Southern California.