Matthew

porubsky

writer

alchemist

Storyteller

We are all in the practice of refinement. My pieces are a collaboration of the elements that surround us. They are rituals to observe, take part in, or transmute. The promised process leads to a limitless elixir.

Upcoming Readings —

Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library

Sunday, Nov. 17 at 3 p.m.

Lawrence Public Library

April 2025

Missouri Book Tour

Spring 2025

Possessing uncanny depths of feeling and perception, insight and vision, Matthew Porubsky renders this light into art, "laying such words / soft beside you. / They pulse... / each a petal, / a dagger, a star.”

– Jeff Tigchelaar, author of Certain Streets at an Uncertain Hour

Many of these titles have a degree of rarity. If any are listed as unavailable, contact the publisher or seek them by other means.

You can also contact me – mmporubsky@gmail.com – to order multiple titles and have them signed.

Noble metals –

stand in old light

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A conversation exploring the correspondence between change and constancy roams the landscapes of Stand in Old Light. This plunge into the dissection and questioning of relationships to oneself and life companions seeks enlightenment in both the depths and heights of human experience. With imagery steeped in the mysteries of the tarot, this book uncovers how events, people, and places align in one grand constellation.

from Stand in Old Light

Lay my body out.
Begin recording incisions.

View
what has changed from birth.

I have been born
many times.

Each
rearranges
my insides.

Its mush-paste
sticks, holds fast.

Wear a mask,                          gloves.
            Recite what you see.
            Weigh.
            Catalogue.

Carve me as your sculpture.

I’ll have my eyes closed.

Matthew Porubsky’s Stand in Old Light will “hover / heart-like” with me for a long time. My immediate reverence for these poems almost startled me, as the experience of reading them reminded me of the first time I fell in love with poetry, with Whitman nearly thirty years ago. This book is also a song of the self, an introspective travelogue asking questions (“How can the clouds appear as one?”) and offering insights (“We are a nature collage”) about our world. It’s hard not to feel grateful to be alive when a simple loaf of bread is reframed as “having the sun on a cutting board.” This book is aptly named—it absolutely shimmers with light.

– Melissa Fite Johnson, author of Midlife Abecedarian

Serpent’s lap

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Journey into an esoteric dreamscape with the poems in Serpent’s Lap by Matthew Porubsky. Through a combination of archaic symbolism and ritual, these poems lead to encounters with transcendent travels, exploration of manifestation, and a study of the shadow self. This chapbook is concise and cryptic but presents a lasting, mysterious beauty.

What Will Grow

Sort the seeds I have left you into piles.
Keep them away from wind.

Light purple seeds have the strongest scent.
Sew them in a pouch.
Put it beneath your pillow.
You will see me when you close your eyes.

Plant the orange seeds after the first snow under a new moon.
These will grow for you in three color.
Give them to someone and ask them to sort the seeds into piles.

Golden seeds are to shell and eat.
You will taste sun in the back of your mouth.

Porubsky’s poems move between subjecthood and objecthood, including the reader in rituals and attention to materiality. The poems notice the formidable and the wounded but resilient body, and they openly deceive as they blur body into objects. They reveal a speaker that is mysterious, but felt, often shifting and changing, demanding to be birthed, heard, remembered, revered, prayed to.

– Simone Savannah, poet, essayist, and author of Uses of My Body

RULED BY PLUTO

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The voices featured in Ruled by Pluto resonate with escapism. The root of their ambition, apathy, or obsession varies, but all orbit around a longing for change. From voices exotic to familiar, the speakers of these poems explore the emotional polarities that come with responsibility and attachment and how they confront or deny these feelings.

P.S.

And I still have your key.
It’s rusted some at the teeth.
I dropped it in the lake out of spite
but instantly grabbed for it,
without thinking, as it was sinking.
It was like that time last summer.

I shouldn’t have done that.

I see it on my keychain hiding
in line with all the others.
I remember what it used to open:
doors, hallways, rooms
of noise and breath from the slid
twists of grooves and pins.

Now, it is as quiet as rust.
It smells like lake water.

I’ll keep it.

This poetic landscape is populated by mythic and fantastic characters such as John the Baptist, angels lounging on pool tables, and a brain in a glass jar drinking whiskey on the rocks. Porubsky strikes a taut balance between playfulness and acuity of absence that permeates just beneath the skin.

– Gary Jackson, author of Missing you, Metropolis

john

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Experience defining moments in the lives of scandalous and celebrated historical figures who all have one thing in common – the name John. This chapbook focuses on events crucial to the renown of these individuals and sheds light on the contemporary significance of these incidents.

John Glenn

Cinch black space.
Firefly ice crystals
swirl to ride the pull,
a weightless loop.
In unison I life,
shine quiet-flash
in reflection.

Twenty-plus well-known Johns – including variations of the name – have their stories turned into short, cryptic lines, like a few key words and phrases cut out of a biography and artfully arranged. It’s history through the eye of the haiku poet who has a habit of seeing things from odd angles.

– Brian Daldorph, author of Kansas Poems

PORUBSKY’S – TRANSCENDENT DELI

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WATCH IT NOW

Porubsky’s – Transcendent Deli follows Matthew Porubsky on his journey to discover the history and appeal of the business his grandparents began over seventy years ago. Through the years, C.W. Porubsky’s Deli and Tavern has survived fires and floods, has been recognized locally and nationally as a culinary legend, and has become a second home to thousands of its patrons with its atmospheres and aromas. Matthew’s search leads him to tight-lipped family members, gossiping great-aunts, and hot pickles tasting on the streets of Topeka, Kansas, to reveal the greatness that began in a little red shack across the tracks in “Little Russia” and has enabled it to carry on while other small businesses like it have perished.

In addition to the historical significance of this documentary, the creators raise the artistic bar, making the film a visual and auditory delight. So familiar do we become with Porubsky’s Deli that we come away feeling a regular’s affection for the place and for the people who have served up that good chili in the Little Russia neighborhood for over sixty years.

– Amy Fleury, author of Sympathetic Magic

Fire Mobile
(the pregnancy sonnets)

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The poetic narrative of Fire Mobile begins with the joining of two lovers and culminates in new life. These sonnets observe the mysterious, transformative, and unpredictable progression of pregnancy. The mundane and bizarre are domains playfully traversed in its pages as well as profound love and awe for the creative capacities of the human body.

(Idol Worship)

The position is a perpetual
variable focused around a faint
percussion progression. A ritual
of taps in a steady pulse starts to paint

broad strokes, watery and blooming, along
your ridges and trim. It’s never had such
resonance throughout – trembles that prolong
instances past instances. A warm touch

of breath leads the beats to timpani speed,
rolling over itself at a tumbling
pace, bulging peripheral views that lead
into the hazy summit. The climbing

lifts to air, and floats on a rapid hum
of moist skims to that final, deepest drum.

Meticulously syllabic but not metrical, these sonnets follow their own clock while keeping one eye on the calendar, measuring transformation in quatrains and trimesters. And each one, when it has run its familiar course and delivered its final flourish, has given something new to the world – an original song “some months rehearsed / in the waters of you.”

– Eric McHenry, author of Potscrubber Lullabies

voyeur poems

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Enter into the psyches of various observers as they discover their involvement in events they feel dissociated from. These poems are a mixture of fantasy and reality, bringing into question the authenticity of truth for both the narrator and the reader. The intimacy created in these scenarios is exhilarating, romantic, and elegiac to the point of immersion, perception becoming both the rift and a bridge to cross it.

from a skeleton in clothes

spirits slip in skin.
my fingers stretch and spread
the hairs on my arms and neck
rise like the dead.

i tried to get rid of them once
and filled each pocket with purple clusters
of lavender leaves, stems, and flowers.
encircle in sweets scents,
a salty red stream bled from my nose
and my skin started to itch,
like i shouldn’t be in it.