Max McDonough

Most Things May Never Happen

The missile knows where it is at all times.

It knows this because it knows where it isn’t.

It’s like Memory’s encrypted files

we rifle through, saying No, not there, but. A nervous smile.

I’m six floors up. I have a story I live inside. It doesn’t

mention the missile, which knows where it is at all times.

Not seeing the building from where I sit inside

when I say it’s “sturdy,” I’m recalling a past image.

Ironically, through the window, I’m looking back in time:

City Hall’s roof-perched statue of Penn, 80s high-rises 

bankish & glittering, bluest at autumn’s limit.

The missile knows where it is at all times.

It’s almost offensive how beautiful, where the missile might.

By obtaining a difference. Yet I have known subtraction

in all its forms. Have listened. Have devised

an arithmetic, spoken up, chimed in, tried

to love & love & love & love

while the missile, knowing where it is, keeps time.

I think it isn’t about surviving it. It’s about time.

Thunder Marginalia

It’s you again, hello! on that Chinatown bus, watching the old woman

try to board with two live chickens, though the driver

refuses. They argue in the jackhammer & steam of the street.

The cage rattles in place in the crosswalk pocked with last night’s pizza.

You’re a heat-signature, window-pressed, damp & flammable

with the starry oil of anxiety—for what’s coming, arrived. The fist

that might. The drawn match. The claw. The strike. The flat

dread of the serialized Worst.         Which worst? I had meant to ask

to unfamish you, to breathe, the shouting having stopped, the window fogging up—

so she strangles the chickens there in the street in the bars of their cage

and boards the bus, and so what?, you say, it’s what she had to do

to get where she was going, don’t you think?

And when two people have fallen out of love: Thank god, is what they think

as they do to each other what that woman did, hands already reaching in.

The Approach

In the subterranean lobby of the YMCA in Maplewood, Minnesota.

In the slow & whirling light, the woman, alone at her table, stood and screamed.

To punish me for being employed, she approached the front counter.

We were opaque to each other as the blustery months of winter I was good for.

Things I was good for: lost pickleball keys, a jammed locker, a puddle in the stall.

Someone had lost their swimming cap, an heirloom ring.

Each morning I swerved from my suburb through dark flurries spinning, ice forming its crust.

I arrived at the lobby where people seemed to happen & I noticed.

She screamed.

She arrived every morning at 4:30, tapping on the glass door I hadn’t unlocked.

Once inside, she applied black lipstick in smears.

She sat at her corner table doodling, muttering, reading, humming.

Until, upwardly, as if from the blue throat of another world: a scream.

Sister, these years later I think of you.

Our shadows crossed in the blear of snowy windows.

Was it one specific morning?

Many mornings blurring into one?

We hugged each other very closely.

Anatomy of an Hour

If I splay down on thick carpet.

If shadows move like the blue undersides of leaves.

If everything in the end becomes ellipsis, kindling in Memory’s furnace. 

There is no “then,” then, I think. 

Only light’s question through the linens, ambered & hovering. 

A blush. 

Raspy oak, grass stiff as hay.

Gauze of pine smoke netting the backyard I had run across.

At the sound of her calling. 

What day is it that floats up when the brain blanks-out,

an errant skein inside a wave of dust? 

Is that you, Mom? —subdued, but not erased? 

Almost nothing could make

me rise from this spot.

Lobby Music

Turn it around, she said.

The letter alpha was once zed, which is

hard to believe and getting ahead of ourselves

already in language—