Crabwise
The derelict box trap in the brackish creek
behind his grandparents’ campground RV,
padded with slime-reeds and a thick dark
stinking mud, was fun to
poke with a stick
from the footbridge above. Having been kicked
from home for the weekend, and don’t
come back, why—
he could hardly recall now that the trap’s cull ring
had released a chewed up
croaker into free-float
procession on the water’s leafed surface. So he kept
prodding, teased out a small green crab,
half-rotted, nipped at
by whatever else in there
had been living until it starved too, bait
for the next, kept going like that, more food
for the crab hatchlings
swarming the cage somehow this early
in spring, a milk-plume of teeth, feasting, tiny
enough he’d mistaken them
for water bugs until just then, and thought: brushed chitin
where the pincers will be,
eventually. He put down
his stick. Little aliens, lovesick—
cast off, stricken atavistic
with growing—their charged tender
larval hearts molting.
Listen, Love
I never asked for yard work or its sadnesses,
August days filling green plastic barrels to the brim
with weed stalks, roots, unlucky worms. Weekends,
I coiled bare fingers around the furred blades stubborn
to survive. I had my stubbornness, too. My skin thinly
peeling, hours and hours I filled the barrels anyway, dragged them
wheel-less and scraping on the sidewalk, because my father told me to,
half a mile through powerlines scrub to the dump site.
My mother slept all day or shopped endlessly online
for dolls. At night, the foyer’s tall curio glowed, glass shelves
stuffed with her curated faces. Sometimes she’d sit in front,
stare up at them like limbed stars.
Each day returned to me unharmed. Each day
some morning thing came, beating its wings. My father who stayed
long on the riding mower for peace, I still hear him calling me
away from that house, to the backyard or needy lawn, his voice
straining, half-muffled by sliding door glass or an open screen.
Even now everything in me is lifting to follow it.
Male Pattern
Early fade, it has come to this, in the spring
of my twenty-second year, scrounging
through the insufficient sink light,
scrounging in the fresh, unwanted space
for an explanation
among the fallen stalks,
the mutinous
loosening, then gone. Outside, the night
magnolias have bloomed late
but white beneath starlight, & the dark
green leathery leaves are unerringly
dark, thick
as pauldrons, hexing
silver pebbles from their polish
& flinging them at the window, soundless,
so turning from the mirror, from my own
reversed face:
the hallucination of moths,
electric & mute, in the night somehow
still darkening.
*
Down, in the under-threading
of nucleotides, twisting
down from my mother’s father,
down in his pattern that is also
my pattern, there
he is, still
living, no hair, a box of cigars
tucked under his arm as he slips
out the garage, into the oil-
black air not yet
ruptured by police sirens, officers
knocking, pushing
open the unlocked door—
his wife in the kitchen only
just before, releases
her telephone cord
from around my mother’s neck.
*
Call once & hang up, then call again—he told
his mistresses. But my mother kept
receipts from his work pants
stored in a shoebox beneath her bed…
When she unfolded them crinkling
apart like the wings of dead insects
for her mother to see, proof—
& the disbelieving room
turned on its side, angry, then blue
light in the window glass—
does violence live in the genes?
Their story is telling itself
in the dormant voice
of a seed,
muffled behind husk, there, between
my ears,
my ears
ringing and ringing.
*
The years between
constrict. At dinner, my mother, testifying.
She’s the casual refugee, history-
keeper runaway
now laundry-queen, changing
loads between coating batches of raw chicken
with Shake ’N Bake, sipping
always on a glass of wine, swirling the ice.
At night, her erratic machines
sputter on fabric softener
satiny as moon, toxic soups of bleach, detergent,
routine, TV. She sets the glass
down again,
the hot iron fuming, her face lit
blue with dramatic crime movies, actors
she recognizes from other shows, other roles, faces
back-lit by a cathode,
shifting, troubled, familiar as her own.
*
In the half-image of the bathroom window,
my hair was white
dandelion fluff.
At the tip of each feathery strand,
the bulbous face
of a family member—some I didn’t
know I had remembered
until then, & they were all arguing
with each other, in the unintelligible language
of anger—snarling, nipping
with smokers’ teeth, threatening over
& over to sink the first
crumbling bite.
& beyond that reflected me,
the dark yard
of the anxiety I seemed to stand in—all of it—
erupted in gust,
the magnolia, the grass, the loose dirt
weighing the grass down to root, the little
dumb moths
the color of wishfulness, tumbling—
& one by one—mother, grandfather—then
in clumps, the seed stalks
of my family,
my hair—whipped off
spiraling with diminishing screams away,
away from my newly bald & shining scalp.
------------------------------------------------------
Max McDonough grew up outside of Atlantic City, New Jersey, but escaped to Virginia at the age of sixteen. When night expeditions to the local Walmart parking lot there became too perilous an ordeal, he matriculated to the University of Virginia, where he dodged a pre-medical education and pursued a degree in English instead. He is an MFA candidate at Vanderbilt University, and has work appearing or forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Columbia Poetry Review, RHINO, and others.