Welcome readers!
We’re happy to introduce Max McDonough, our selection for October’s Poetry at Ephemera. Thanks to Max and everyone who submitted! If you’d like to participate, we will be fielding submissions each month to publish one poem per issue from the same poet for the month. Each poet receives a $200 honorarium. For full rules and more info please see our designated post about Poetry at Ephemera. You can also submit via the button:
Introducing, Max Mcdonough!
Writer Bio
Max McDonough’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Best New Poets, AGNI, the Adroit Journal, Food52, Northwest Review, Flipboard’s 10 for Today, T Magazine, and elsewhere. A National Poetry Series finalist, he has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Community of Writers, and Vanderbilt University. He lives and teaches in Philadelphia, PA.
Artist Statement
I carry around this Charles Wright line in my brain: “All forms of landscape are autobiographical.” Ultimately, I’m a landscape poet. There’s so much going on out there in the backyard! I love found networks of images that repeat (with variation), similar to how chord progressions function in music, and when these images are brought together and dramatized in language, that’s where I find the greatest sense of meaning.
My story, the SparkNotes version: I grew up in the pinelands and marshes of southern New Jersey with a mom who mixed up her idioms. She’d say, “from the gecko” instead of “from the get-go,” for instance. As I get older, I keep bumping into these phrases I didn’t realize I’d been saying “differently” my entire life. The freshness of her denatured language is exactly what my poems try to achieve: make the ordinary new. It’s a strange toolkit maybe, but it’s the one I use to make sense of those landscapes of my childhood—the scuff of our littered-in woods, the oyster marshes my brother and I mapped out in our flip-flops.
Poems
Each issue of Ephemera spanning October will feature one poem from Mac McDonough. After each issue drops, the poem from that issue will then appear here as well. This post will remain on our Substack, free to view, for the year.
Poem 1 of 4
Incunabula, Mother Tongue
My mother—blogger, doll addict
cyber queen, sniper
at the eBay auction computer screen—
mixed her idioms.
From the get-go, for example,
became From the gecko
when she said it. Not the sharpest
bowling ball in the shed.
He side-blinded me. Shithead thinks he’s cool
as mustard. Thinks he’s right up my sleeve.
I escaped from New Jersey
for college, which opened up a whole nother
can of germs. In emails I wrote: Professor,
I’ll have to mow it over a little longer.
Professor, without a question of a doubt.
I didn’t realize I made switches too
until I re-read them—a nervous,
first-gen scholarship student—
as I’m sure my mother didn’t think
she’d altered anything
in her life. But that’s a different chiasmus
for a different line of thought,
not for nights like this one, alone
and happy mostly, my heart at the peck and call,
though, of those suburban woods
of my childhood again—
the ultraviolet yellow feathers
of witch-hazel thicket, serrated
huckleberry leaves—the understory
so dense, tangled to itself, that walking
a straight line becomes
a tight circle, and my mother’s voice is mine.
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Poem 2 of 4
Scull Bay
Under the moon wrapped in gauze,
with one white bird out in the marsh hay
stalking shimmers beneath the water,
my little brother and I are filling beach buckets
with junk from the salt mud: silt-clogged
pocket lighter, stopwatch
stopped, an otherwise pretty doll
head, eyelids bobbing seizure-like
when I tilt it in my hand. Our plan
is to sell the stuff roadside, buy
escape tickets with the money, we think—
we oldest two who can hardly
stand each other, me often pinning his arms
under my knees, jabbing his chest, calling
the dog to lick his open mouth
while our mother shouts from the computer
upstairs, or argues with our father
about a broken door hinge, the unwanted family
reunion next month, his garage-hidden
handle of vodka. Cigarette smoke
chokes her closed office like the fog swirling
blue over the bay-tide here
drawn into itself like a secret.
Half an hour into walking, my foot finds
in the mud the point-tip
of a gnawed-up jig, its decapitated hook
piercing my flip-flop an inch
into my left heel,
flesh ripping inward and oozing. But I can’t
pull it out. Limping, useless, I call
the search off, less than half a bucketful each,
upsetting my brother who still
wants to keep looking, not knowing
for what exactly, in the trash and sand
running longer than we can follow, through the marsh
with its lone white bird who won’t
turn her head, the shelved moon too wounded
to blink, distant, precious
as my brother’s life is to me, our lives
to each other, though we can’t
see it, not yet.
Poem 3 of 4
Python with a Dog Inside It
Poor dog. Chained to the pine behind the camper RV
where else could it go but in?
White barb. Placental speckle
unwriggling. & the elastic ligament that walks
the skull, unhinged,
over the dog’s tufty head, neck, torso, tail.There could be Heaven in there.
Pleasure in adrenaline, pleasure in uncoiling
the grip. Pulsed bristles, halogen
leaking from the vacant bocce courts…But the chain yanks back—tangled around the dog
already in the throat’s long slink. & because
the dog, wet, fetal, slideshead-first in, the python with no mechanism
for revision
is tethered to what it did,
& to the pine whose fan of roots
anchors it to ground, the dog to it.Everything wears its consequence, extending
beyond itself the visible.
This is what we see.Pattered mud. Metal bowl, tipped over. Film of water
glinting white. Crisscrossing
spike-like shadows
darkening toward morning’s old man, the machete
he’ll bring, not yet.
All night—the other world
chained to this worldby its stuff: a dog, a chain, a pine, a python.
Poem 4 of 4
Conch
Bright against the tiki bar’s
dark wood, a tiny ocean
sloshes inside. Technicallya summation of all sounds
perpetrated in the barscrambles to a wash of echoes
intimating waves—a wide lonely
pressed to one’s ear, the finely furredtunnel twisting into the brain.
Among the stuff the conch hears
and, by hearing, erases:I bet you still on
Mommy’s credit card, the man
says to him. Sucklin’ them fat teats.
Can’t even help yourself
she taste so good…Compartments. Rooms inside rooms. Inside
his chest thrums
the dumbest song. The song istequila. He was feeling on edge.
He was drinking not
because of what the manmakes him remember—
a basement bedroom. He is lying in bed. It’s dark except for the blacklight in which
glows, tacked to the wall, a felt poster of a black panther, yellow eyes, open jaw.
Bamboo beads for a door trickle like rain as they split. His mother, wasted, her nightgown halfway down her shoulders, her chest. Her nipple, the shape, the dim color in the doorway, the beads behind. She does not come closer. She says something he can’t decipher. He stares at the panther’s teeth. She
speaks. The world gets trapped inside.In the bar he smashes the conch across the man’s unbearable mouth.
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