Embedded Files
You did someone a kindness by deserting your tools in the studio
Do not leave the muscle out in the rain,
says Deuteronomy, more or less. But
Leviticus is a slide show for strangers
who force other strangers to take God’s name
in vain. As you crawl toward your final illness,
let the rest of us crawl alongside you.
Your bones are already in the next world.
The ice you never dream of is a dark tongue
etching a channel between you and your
regular commute. Demons reproduce
by diving into your blind spot and having
their way with your amygdala. Concrete
surprises you by beginning as liquid
but never learning to melt, like the hard sum
of the moon’s belly. To walk any farther
without wool on your back might be fatal.
Watch me pull this sin out of a rabbit
Mid-migration, some water birds mistake
wet pavement for a lake, and landing too far
from the true shore, fail to reclaim the sky.
Everyone’s story begins in the upper
ionosphere, our bodies starting out
as arguments of ascent. Even salt
needs gravity to do its work. What odd
miracle followed the first burnt offering
to cause such fuss? I used to enumerate
my congenital flaws with such precision
you’d think I wanted to be left on that hill
for the wolves. My father attempted to cure
my shyness by putting me on radio.
Reasons of anatomy and (in a way)
geometry compel the owl to revolve
its head so far to see, eyes more tube than sphere.
My childhood cowboys were figments of cinema
Masked against threat of godlessness, the surgeon
steps forward. Before God might mean prior
to God, rather than facing God. Prior
to God, we field-dressed the gutted animals
of our belief. Nobody ever said come,
let us fear. Wary of what images
might do when fed into marble or paint,
our ancestors made pictures only in air.
Even truth starts to fester when divested
too soon from your mouth’s framework. You enter
the turnstile and a trick of friction lights
your pocket on fire. The interrogator
considers how water changes the terms
of conversation. People die of thirst
every day, throats jammed with the answers,
wheel wells still wet from the back of the dew.
I wake up feeling dirty when I dream of pork on the hoof
The painter’s true gift is how he depicts
calamity, everyone’s teeth gone blue
in the gestapo light. Man holds gold like
gold is God, but if God lives in the gold
it’s only as a joke. Where is the proof
my people are broken from birth? God’s code
is not unlike an epic poem (both
in the repetition and the absurdity).
In Rome I made a man laugh so hard he said
I have to hug you now. I didn’t know him
well but I complied. The president can’t stop
examining himself in the mirror
of our minds. The unsouled things of this planet
will go on after us. Geese weave a voice
from whatever the morning lays out: grass
yellow with sleep, last call for coyotes.
The angels of vocabulary spit your words into the surf
In the town that protected Dante’s grave
from war I lost my way. Easy to think
something divine wanted my attention.
The difference between planting and burying
lies in the words we recite over earth,
or how deep we will follow our wishes
into the ground. All branches imagine
their leaves are small wings that might be enticed
into flight if they could just learn to steer
in the wind’s mouth. Turtles are dioramas
of similar struggle. The painter gives
many reference points to help us create
our prooftexts for amnesty. The trawler,
using boat logic, believes the seabed
has a single rule: the whales are in charge
of us all and their god is shaped like salt.
Becka Mara McKay is a poet and translator. She directs the Creative Writing MFA at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida, where she serves as faculty advisor to Swamp Ape Review. Her newest book of poems is The Little Book of No Consolation (Barrow Street Press). You can find her recent work in Witness, Salt Hill Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Permafrost.
Copyright © 2025 by Becka Mara McKay, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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