“Your dangerous shoe.” A Poem by Lila Matsumoto
From the Collection Talk a Blue Streak
When I woke up I discovered that Dorothy’s flatmate had taped up my broken shoe so tightly with electrical tape that I couldn’t get my foot in it to go to work. The flatmate had been very kind. He showed me pictures of a pet falcon he had when he was a boy. He was from Serbia. The only other Serbian person I’d heard a memory from was a famous poet who read his work at an event at the university. In between the poems he told us stories about his childhood and drank out of his water bottle. I had never seen anyone drink water like him: instead of sips, he put the entire opening of the bottle fully in his mouth and took a shot. Then he resumed with his short dark poems about angels and bandages.
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Talk a Blue Streak is available from Monitor Books.
Lila Matsumoto
Lila Matsumoto’s publications include the poetry collections Talk a Blue Streak (Monitor, 2026), Two Twin Pipes Sprout Water (Prototype, 2021), Urn & Drum (Shearsman, 2018), and a creative-critical artist’s book, The Very Nature of Materiality is an Entanglement (In Other Words, 2024). She plays in the band Food People and teaches creative writing and poetics at the University of Nottingham.
