Current Issue: Spring/Summer 2011

Elationship  
Marc McKee

I hate the rain, the way it falls
and falls and fails to be
a teleportation device, the way
it creeps into the weave of a pair of jeans
and I hate the mundane.
The way it fails to actualize itself,
sailing through the open window,
when it tries to be sirens
every night at the same time
and becomes flashing lassoes
falling over the alleyway
then disappearing, the overfull ashtray
it tries to be before snapping into sharp triangles
as if exploded from the jaw of a glass wolf,
suddenly the cashed cigarette butts lit
and lolling and banishing the mundane
which after all was just trying to be still.
The way you pay attention
to an object or a face
and it roars into something else
I mean I love it.
The blue fingers of miniature lightning
when a load of ordinary clothes
is vaulted from the dryer
into the green basket
that reads United Dairy Inc.,
Martin’s Ferry, Ohio
in such an archaic, blistered way
that it might have had hands lain on it,
dry hands washed too often
after a night of regulated erotic rambunction,
with only the glow from the red light outdoors
falling up across the face
of the clock, barely even a shadow
moving. I hate the mundane,
the way it doesn’t exist. It tries
to be the shrill beep of a dump truck
inching backwards from a stop sign
in a town you know you’ll leave,
then even that sound reaches
through the side of a building
to cinderblocks that begin invisibly
to dissolve into tears
behind the caked layers of paint.

 

Marc McKeereceived his MFA from the University of Houston and his PhD from the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he lives with his wife, Camellia Cosgray. Recent work appears in The Minnesota Review, absent, Barn Owl Review, Handsome, and Copper Nickel and is forthcoming from New South and Artifice. He is the author of a chapbook, What Apocalypse?, from New Michigan Press, and a full-length collection, Fuse, which is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2011.