Matthew Bruce Harrison’s writing can be found in West Branch, Yemassee, Carolina Quarterly, Texas Review, Adroit Journal, Cincinnati Review, Bayou, Gargoyle and Permafrost, among others. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart and for the Best of the Net Anthology, and his fiction has been nominated for the storySouth Million Writers Award and was a finalist for the Mid-American Review Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize. Originally from Georgia, he now lives and teaches in Minnesota.

It is pouring somewhere in the universe

	                                 and there is a reason
why wine is used
				        for communion. You kill
the bottle to fall
				        away like a New Year
cork that dissolves
				        in garden mint. Or body
emptied so transported
				        to a dark landfill outside
the city they say never
			        	sleeps, lying
in cool soil, in shards 
				        of moon and plastic	
parts with everybody
				        else’s unexceptional 
dreams of a cathedral
				        arch lighting
the critically acclaimed
				         last show of the final
season, of a star
				        worthy of all stars
and the quiet river
				        stirring constellations
or bodies in hot beds
			        	who drink the sweat
of the city evaporated
				         into breath, who hear 
the ovation and fizzle
				        off to sleep hoping
it is nothing, it is only
				        the long hoped for
rainstorm with an extra-      
				        terrestrial name.