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[mclegerpoetry]

Airport Blvd

4 a.m.: a blithe plane overhead hushes the grasshoppers. Humiliating.  2 cigarettes in the pack, coming down I wonder if nerves flicker when the switch is flicked: that second it takes for landing  gear to wilt out. I can see carnal  visions in the pilot's eyes, canals steered defiantly away from the marshes of spectacle that will emerge from dirt should 200 souls resign to the margins  of a black box. The pack is empty now. The grasshoppers have received word: landing gear was deployed. They celebrate. I am envious of all with plans, gloating  backup protocol, failsafe levers, liabilities.  Coming down at 4 a.m. & the night sky is  a hangnail. Jaw-dropped stars, antennae  crescents under boot. Humiliating. 

[mclegerpoetry]

Travel Notes from a Pavilion of Leaky Faucets

Once in a blue moon  I am gripped so tightly by the violent joy  of life     I separate myself, forced to contort in a jar of light  & watch my beautiful friends & I fly down the interstate raging as if fevered               & reconvene knowing I will never have this again instead more, open snug in their paradise of cold space  I see everything       (honking! moan of brakes!)                          in the rearview mirror  once again I am reminded I must live in this moment or die             simple as that     *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *  We've arrived at a motel  on the beach.  It seems to house nothing  but scraps of moonlight, rotten wave-crest & flotsam walking.  From the balcony, the sun  looks like a fist unclenched  in the water & my mouth  has soured with highway air.  For a moment / all  a distant memory.     *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *                  I am a traveler stuck            in a pavilion of leaky faucets  with my desert wine & sun-chewed friends      I can hear the music ruthless as ever              the waves treading erotic                  red carpet walk up to                   the Palace of Oars                            where I will wade out of myself    steep in the kind forgiving light from   which I turned — in my stubbornness,                              grace

[mclegerpoetry]

From the Window

I.  The construction workers eat nails in their cars for lunch coughing dandelions silently as permitted into their elbows.  The crane’s clunky movements are as swift as the swab taking place down the block in a rich woman’s throat. She exhales evening.  March 19th, 2020  II. Headlights flash  inside the parking garage  fetus like tiny moons. People  fuck near the machines, fuck the machines, lick  desperately for sterility  & sound. They haven’t  cut our tongues out yet but people will soon  mistake guns for vacuums & clamor for feeding tubes  made in factories shut down  years prior. The doves talk  of ingenuity, self-sufficiency, self-respect; the housing  market is great, they say  there’s dying trees & empty milk cartons all around town. Feathers rain & humans fall  to their knees, they cackle, oldest trick in the book. They’re like zoo animals the way they hoard corners. III.  This morning I awoke covered in oleander. I snacked throughout the day, counted hidden instruments in my ceiling     I tried to touch      but could only hear I made tea  from the gusts of my fan & caught my thumb in the windowsill.  My air conditioner died so I was forced to hear my head.  It sounded like a child  peeling an orange. I put the scraps in a jar for a sunny day when I am forced to be myself. Less & less.  March 19th, 2020 

[mclegerpoetry]

Skylight

It’s a holy day for mosquitoes.  The cat is missing an eye.  There’s 46 holes leaking piss  from a can of Bud Light.   Everybody is having a good time.  Soon, sneakers will hijack the moon, briefly, from the skylight.  Few will notice.  Nobody wants to say it.  Jenny & Mark are contorted  on the floor like a game of jacks, Sarah’s chasing junebugs up the stairs, Alex is freebasing estrogen in the garden, & Jackson unlocked the bedroom door to ransack the medicine cabinet.    No, nobody can say it.  Everybody is having a good time.  LSD by the lakeside  turns timid teens to trees, the beautiful few into curtailed birds.      Soon, one will try to fly & the rest will crawl away     dead-eyed muddy shoes with lockjaw. In that moment: a wedding of lucidity & sight  the water, now hallowed, engulfs  Sarah, transposed  into yellow tape across the lake.

[mclegerpoetry]

deadbolt

a moment of clarity  under a marquee of traffic lights you blast through  ziplocks of God in the trunkwatchout now a ’95 civic huffs  your bumper’s bowels   breath held, maim check            uninsured covenant in a look — if i can take this lucidity  inside like a broken knee i don’t know if it’s true  that nobody's beyond help you blazed away in laurel crushed two for the toll road   as for me, someday, i will sleep with my deadbolt locked

[mclegerpoetry]

Elegy in Dirt

As the white keys keel over,  air dampens, so comes musk. There is a violence in creation: the bishop whips angelus bells, the furrow exalts the plow,  pen meets paper & suddenly  the dead writhe in sodden holes. Twilight  outside your mother’s house I jar the silence, strum shadows out of streetlights. Your brother has a child now, the embalmer buys a ring or maybe  a daisy milks the furloughed sun, beetles decorate an elk carcass  & an almost-nephew, dappled  in red ribbons like a tree, may sing the beginning sprouts out nothing. My garden dies every May.  How absurd, to resurrect & stab you        I who cower to car alarms         I who turned my back, mangle                                    urns, you who  ring doorbells & run into the sun; Cohen wrote 80 verses for Hallelujah          & I am so tired  of seeing through your eyes  at night, grasping at straws of nothing  as light withdraws, melting towards  the roof of warmth, unaware the scalding  spoon will fall to the bedroom floor,  unaware mother will get that feeling  at work, unaware my father will punch angels through the wall once the phone’s unearthed — it took me years to start revising poetry & now  I have many stupid ideas of heaven.