fox goes to the fox hospital
by Matthew Siegel
And look there he is back in the hospital
in the easy blue dressing gown, at this facility
with a delicate floral print on the walls.
He’d always had an affinity for flowers.
And healthy yet being repaired, he is back
in this gown and it is like an old costume
pulled out of a locked trunk in the attic
of bad dreams. In the gown he feels naked,
notices his softness, how his sex has never seemed less willing
to rise. As if there could be such a cause in this place.
He is healthy but writing a poem.
It is called ‘going back to the hospital’ and written
in lowercase, most notably the first person ‘I’
which so often had stood properly capitalized
but for some reason today feels diminished.
He’s writing a poem called ‘going back to the hospital’
but really he wishes he could draw a comic
featuring a small mammal version of himself.
His animal would be a fox, he decides, and promptly
changes the title to ‘fox goes to the fox hospital’.
From Blood Work. Reproduced with kind permission from CB Editions.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best First Collection 2015
Blood Work
Matthew Siegel
About Matthew Siegel
Matthew Siegel (b. 1984, New York) knew from the age of 16 that he loved writing poetry more than anything in his life. At the same age, he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease: the struggle to remain whole in the face of his condition is the subject of his debut collection, Blood Work (CB Editions 2015).
The book was first published in the USA by the University of Wisconsin Press after the manuscript won the prestigious Felix Pollak prize. It was immediately hailed as ‘a genuine contribution to the literature of illness’ by the poet Mark Doty, who said ‘in Siegel’s capable hands, illness reveals how barely contained any human being is, and how we reach, alone and together, for whatever will hold us.’
The poets Matthew most admires are Walt Whitman and Rainer Maria Rilke. His own advice to a young poet is to ‘be an active, hungry reader and you have to be willing to not look for reasons to dismiss work too quickly. Be ruthless only with your own truth. Know when you’re saying something that isn’t true.’
Matthew was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, USA and his works have appeared in Indiana Review, The Rumpus, Tusculum Review, and Southern Humanities Review. He currently teaches Literature and Creative Writing at San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
