Matthew Feinstein is a neurodivergent writer from Tracy California. He is pursuing an MFA at Randolph College starting Winter 2020. His poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Drunk Monkeys, Macqueen’s Quinterly, Running Wild Press, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere.
In Breeds of Breath, Matthew Feinstein writes poems that dare to be different, to look inward on themselves and become cosmic. There is grief and loss and trauma within these pages, but there is also hope and growth, two themes that Feinstein masterfully reflects on in moments readers can live inside of. What Breeds of Breath hinges on is tenderness, and our constant yearning for acceptance, by way of love and of self, and without Feinstein’s additions to that cannon, I fear a part of our worlds would be lost. Get this book for its vulnerability, for the guts it has to make us relearn how to pause, and for its ability to teach us how to come back to who we once were.
— Matt Mitchell, author of The Neon Hollywood Cowboy
Weekly Fantasy
What does promise smell like?
How many breeds of breath
have you inhaled this week?
Do you think of me
when you’re gone?
Do I remind you of home?
I fantasize at home.
When can promise feel like
enough? I imagine you gone—
replaced with the breath
of someone who touches me
every week…
treats the week
like a holy thing. Home
hides memories for me:
A picture of us, fucking, like
flesh is eternal. Breath,
a promise, now gone—
dispersed into air. Gone
feels exclusively mine. Each week,
you inhale foreign breath.
Each week, I want to leave home—
wade through the wilderness like
an aimless vagabond. Tell me,
what do you say about me?
Does he know what gone
tastes like? Is it bitter, like
us? There will be a week
when he’ll make you home
& your comfort-breath
will fade. His breath
will remind you of me.
You’ll speed home.
I’ll have been gone
since last week.
You’ll hurt like
I have. Our home stinks of breath—
stinks like me…Why can’t I leave?
I could be gone by next week.
Can You Reteach Me?
I’m playing chess with you
as if I haven’t done this with
another woman. I hear pieces of
her in your voice as you boast
Check Mate.
We fuck. It’s my millionth
moonlight. You, still foreign,
so I moan a past name.
Do you love me?
I want to say yes but
something else escapes my lips
like a desperate prisoner:
I don’t remember how…
