Matthew Pitt

Matthew Pitt grew up in St. Louis, lived in NYC, LA, the Mississippi Coast, and other
various ports of entry, and is now Associate Professor of English at TCU, in Ft. Worth.
He is author of two fiction collections: These Are Our Demands (Engine Books), a
Midwest Book Award winner, and Attention Please Now (Autumn House Prize Winner).
Individual stories appear in Best New American Voices, BOMB, Oxford American,
Cincinnati Review, Epoch, Conjunctions, Michigan Quarterly Review and The Southern
Review
, and are cited in several Best of volumes. His work has earned awards from The New York Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Mississippi Arts Commission, Bronx Arts Council, and Bread Loaf, Sewanee and Taos Conferences. Additionally, Pitt is Editor of descant, and Contributing Editor for West Branch.

Death of Spin—A 78-RPM Epitaph

Sprawled on vinyl hospital sheets, ventilator about to get nixed, the ancient musician insists: I coulda got recorded. His very voice a wheeze of song. Trouble was his tune didn’t fit the format. See, they used 78-rpm then. Three minutes, all the sound one side can contain. They said cut my song, or else. Nuh-uh. Listen, hit I coulda had wasn’t worth the hit I woulda took. Wasn’t melting down my passion, not for gold, for platinum, for—

Death of Attraction—A 78-RPM About-Face

The night was young, until it wasn’t. Long hours of flirtatious electric listening ending in kissing. The kissing, she’d wanted; how he persisted, she didn’t. He kissed too keenly, leaving rough, literal impressions, marks of his pecking and puckering. Then kept coming back without a pause, without breath, as if he’d capsized and now clung to her for dear life. How would she ever know another day of buoyancy with such a man dragging her down into depths?