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New Poetry with Audio!
Donald Revell Criticism
Brian Henry on Kinsella |
Marc
McKee lives in
Houston. His poems have appeared recently in Elixir, Salt Hill,
Conduit and The Journal. ApplianceIf the lies we told got any
more honest we would not be believed,
thus when I say I was staring at
you, tall, mop-haired and looking
through the dismembered Times because you look like an
acquaintance I haven’t seen in a while,
it is important that you be a foot
shorter and without the great girth
of head that led him to front a band
called APE and get arrested anonymously
in the capital, living only
on orange juice for five days. For some it is no struggle to see the familiar in the
strange—maybe it comes of imagining the
refrigerator as a rocket if we could only
fit! but no— there are too many
supplies. Now you are gone. What would the sky feel like, anyway, if we
could just ride a refrigerator toward
where we saw a lamp fall from high
in the west? Can a toaster grow back the
bagger’s missing hand and so double
his bag-packing productivity or sprout from
her scored knees new legs on the woman at the
bus stop? She’s sitting alone at the
bus stop! With no helpful appliances! and I’m
applying my foot to the gas pedal as
if late for a wedding. Then you changed into a smallish red-haired
girl wearing a football jersey and
a fedora sitting down at my table as
if I hadn’t heard many times already about 13
year olds diving into a pool of
substance abuse after compelled fellatio for
the creepy next-door neighbor—it is a
familiar awfulness, but there is no strange
registry annotating devices suitable for
rendering savaged tugboats into sagacious
dolphins—perhaps if I concentrated long
enough, if I looked into each with supreme
focus, I would turn into a washing machine, air
conditioning, a waffle iron, the as-yet uninvented
finally applied, of some use when you wish to
ascend. InfotopiaI do not recall water. Now one tree becomes a
thousand matches and one match can unbecome a
thousand trees. This begets a certain
feeling about languor. What the TV news promises: Ability to cope with
persistent dangers in the home. Keys to surviving exotic
animals loose in your neighborhood. How not to die but still the ways to die
outnumber the ways to not die. Which beget lyric and lyrical begetting; Even in the tessitura of
moans and panting: music. Hunger can only be
mollified, the mouth at the center of
an hourglass— We may be only thirst
quenched. But our post-script is
unavailable to the mortal eye boarding the train, the
funeral veil smeared with rain. Something late held too
close. Newspapers or museum guards
follow us, as if we meant the art harm or to attend our inevitable
wounding. PensivisionThere’s a sword and blanket
in my heart and I know not my coat of
arms but things could be worse. The more sadness is jettisoned toward the sun
the more the field of post-flight
junk accumulates around the earth. For instance feeling as though you have one
gleaming side to a story while the rest of
the world asserts an opposite. Was I dream-listening again? or did someone say There’s three sides to every story which seemed to appear in the careering heat of a
mathematical moment. Is it a law or a theory or a
flippant conjecture that any body nearing the
speed of light increases sharply in mass toward
really fucking big and how
did that turn into anybody? What weighs on me
is how much I cosmically
do not know but this can act like a
sword or a blanket and meanwhile I like to
proceed as if setting the bottle on the
table gently can avert nuclear disaster,
like the sundrillion things we say and do each
day crane toward a speeding assemblage
bent on a stunning re-calibration so
yes! keep washing that dish, come up
with exact change, straighten the stack
of papers, shave, say aloud if you must
I nouned the verb or I will
sleep tonight the sleep of fretting kings and so on but if comets or meteors or asteroids
could be said to think, for instance one we might
come to know and fear in, say, 2019, then
is that assemblage not thinking Absolutely this is what I was born to do and I
will asbolutely do this absolutely or terribly, silently
focused or thinking This is good—Good? This will change everything. |