New Poetry with Audio!

Donald Revell
Stephen Burt
Paul Hoover
Jonah Winter
Cathy Wagner
Reginald Shepherd
Nin Andrews
Sophia Kartsonis
Sandra Miller
Joshua Harmon
Devin Johnston
Chuck Zerby
Sara Henning
Ognjen Smiljanic
Lance Phillips
Peter Drake
Kathleen Byrne
Ernest Hilbert
Garth Greenwell
Marc McKee

Criticism

Brian Henry on Kinsella
Gabriel Welsch on Northrop
Gabriel Welsch on Smith
Cecily Iddings on Ruefle
Christopher McDermott on Wenderoth

Marc McKee lives in Houston.  His poems have appeared recently in Elixir, Salt Hill, Conduit and The Journal.

Appliance

If 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.

Infotopia

I 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.

Pensivision

There’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.