Fever
by Max McDonough
Maybe it was just the bright snow’s incandescence
that burned through my sheer drapes
and woke me up, and kept burning spectral across the room
as I opened my phone’s inbox to a text message
from my mother, unrecognized
number borrowed from another boyfriend, time-stamped
some slurred hour too early to call. It had slipped in
unannounced while I slept, bearing a picture of a younger me
I almost didn’t recognize, or almost could, grinning
from a swing set, captioned as if from a happy childhood
—can you believe this? I couldn’t
swallow, my throat raw as a boardwalk—the phrase
a splinter in my tongue rubbing against my teeth…
I believe in miles and miles of powerlines.
Squirrel spines. Dog droppings. Deer prints
in loam. The urine tang
of rotten grass clippings piled
high enough to house a colony of skinks. Metallic
hissing at dusk, flashing silver tails.
Shadows of moth-flutter shrinking as night
pries open its beak. The harsh links
between transmission towers. The sleeved white fire
of black cables running a distance
farther than any child could try. This kid,
this kid in my phone in my shaky hand
is quivering
beneath this cold morning’s bleach-bone searing light.
Family Portrait with Puncture Wounds
The freak blueberry bushes my mother demanded
be replanted from the lawn to the backyard—
my little brother’s darting between them, filling
a steel pot, when the sprinklers start to hiss
from their holes, exploding up to spray. But what he hears
are snakes, drops the pot, all the berries spilling
into the bare dirt and sand flooding to mud. No grass,
not yet, this is a week before my father rolls out
sod, the heap of mulch still steaming like a dead woolly
mammoth in the driveway, smell of rot and all
the animals lacing through it—field mice, silver-specked
lizards burrowing in and under the mound
to emerge only after we’ve pretended to
do our homework and go to bed. My brother has cried
all afternoon, on and off, through Chinese take-out,
brushing teeth, now night, a blindfold with large eyeholes
pulled over his head. Inescapable dread
of starting school in the morning, I’m sneaking a peppermint
patty from the pantry for him when I catch my father
driving his foot through the kitchen wall,
our mother still not home from her day shift working
tables at the casinos, working for dirt, she says.
Ars Poetica
The scene comes as a heat shimmer does:
a young summer, sitting with my father
on my grandparents’ drooping porch, watching
an egret down by the marsh’s unmarked edge—
jilted bride with a backwards
neck-crook, stilted white as if for the sake
of brightness. She’s searching between
cattail stalks for small movements to
jab at, plodding over the soft mud, then peering
so long at the same raised shadow, her body
poised, otherworldly almost, her beak
a needle-point blade, that my father
has named her Patience. And when
my mother calls from the house, disgruntled
at something my grandmother said—in the memory,
always just then, as my mother’s voice
rings out in the hot swamp air,
Patience snaps down, spears a frog, and swallows.
