Laura CafassoI realized Matthew McConaughey
Is a damn good actor
Not when he battled the blast off of AIDS
But during the launch of Endurance
During Interstellar
The okra, corn fields are burning, embers
Of distress, as brief as passed-on pioneers
The dust rejects this wasteland building bridges
And infrastructure in bleeding lungs
The schoolbooks says the Apollo missions were fiction
And McConaughey is helpless in his gravity-less ballet
A glimpse into twenty-three years, hours just to him
Seeing his children mirror his own age
And I swear to whatever Buddha-god-Allah thingamajig
This is the first time that when McConaughey cried
I cried too
In this dimension
This blip in blackness, this pathogenic planet
This dollhouse in the void
In a little Italian Connecticut town
Sat a father, two daughters, a grandmother
A revived record player whisper-shouting Perry Como
And an empty chair with permanent body dents
I open my friend’s suite door and a slap of flash
Hits my face, “Candid shots for memories,” she says
Well my grandmother, only hours ago, was sorting
Her life in pictures, Tupperware containers
She claims she’s doing this because you know,
If her heart surgery doesn’t go well,
It’s ok because each child, each grandchild will have a box
And your grandfather already took “half of my heart” anyway, Laura
Silently explosive stars, unheard-of galaxies
Surviving a black hole’s cloak
McConaughey just wants to see his children again
Well let me solve the formula of time and space
Let me tear at the strings of reality
That’s heavy like lead, molten, and carrying my hands down like mutant feathers
Because I feel as stuck as my house
Typed into Google Earth
What am I doing?
McConaughey, I feel like I was in that spaceship with you
I was weightless but Perry Como brought me down
Back to my grandfather’s grave
Can you hear me in some prism of afterlife?
I ripped away the dead autumn leaves from the dying flowers
And never before have I wished so hard to be ignorant
Back to when I was ten, and you ordered that fully intact crab at that restaurant
And I was appalled
But now I know we’re animals in dress clothes
McConaughey, while you’re lost out there
Tell my grandfather I’m sorry he knows why
Will I see him again? Or did he ever see me?
Laura Cafasso is a freshman Writing, Literature, and Publishing student. She loves acting, slam poetry, Marvel movies, and cooking competition shows. She is too excitable and loud for her own good. Laura also likes trashy 80s music and boybands. Laura is involved on campus with Thread Magazine and Gauge Magazine.