Summer 2023 | Poetry
Matt McBride
Three Poems
We elect whoever
wears the worst wig president,
paint faces on watermelons
for the inauguration.
To hide our lives’ smallnesses,
we build bigger homes. Each day
a new lifestyle channel.
There’s the soft meaninglessness
of clouds, aren’t cotton balls enough
to stuff the unstuffed space.
And when we run out of confetti,
we’ll use broken glass.
Every hat’s disposable.
Conversation’s one long game
of two truths, one lie.
All four oceans drained
to make great ball pits.
When our president
promises us nothing,
we take all of it.
Our messiahs are
the families who come
with the picture frame.
Many hearted, we feel
like the skin of a dove
before feathers appear.
Nickel sky.
Trucks shrouded
in bedsheets.
Hotels holding
a gun in each drawer.
Matt McBride's work has recently appeared in The Banyan Review, The Cortland Review, Figure 1, Impossible Task, Guernica, The Rupture, Rust+Moth, and Zone 3 among others. He is the author of one full-length poetry collection, City of Incandescent Light, published by Black Lawrence Press in 2018, and four chapbooks. His most recent, Prerecorded Weather, co-written with Noah Falck, won the 2022 James Tate Prize and is available at SuVision Books. He can be found online at @matthewdmcbride (Twitter), and at_the_mercy_of_the_flies (Instagram).
Matt recommends: Laura Marris' translation of The Plague; Marni Ludwig's Pinwheel; and Frank Herbert's Dune Messiah.