Carrie McGath

Orange


You can’t kick that high no more.
That faceless man standing over me
again. My cold sweat makes the bed
a stone. He is judging me again,
lording over me, reminding me
of it all. I have had it with this shit.
I head to our Little Blue Bitch,
that humming steel of blue
from Detroit. He is like a bad penny.
The engine turns over and the sands
act like my Midwestern snow under
the proud rubber of Akron.
We will get through this.
The headlights see nothing,
it’s all before us like that faceless
penny-man, my nightmares worse
these days. No more being trapped
in the mirror as I look into the rearview,
not realizing sunset is teasing again,
showing me its colors like the trees
about this time of year in that other
Midwestern life so far from now.
Then more orange gyrates ahead of me,
almost like a dance. I would like to dance.
Again. The Buick urges me to slow,
I can’t argue with big blue steel.
I have been trying to do just that.
No dice, love. A smooth glittering smoothing
in front of me like a mirage,
the ones I run toward, desperate.
They never get old. This orange dancing
moment stops. Turns. More glitter. A woman.
A face. Tears. Smeared lipstick. Tired eyes.
Overworked just like mine.
I fold across the velvety bucket seat
that has worn out of will and velvet in spots.
I guess I am not really folding. Not like paper
does. The door opens, creaking.
Her color will never fit in here. At least not
in front, with me. I fold the seat down.
Now that folds like paper.
Even in the darkness away from the headlights,
she glows. Get in. It’s okay. Her tailfeathers fold
over the top of her head, canopying her
like an eggshell.
Lost showgirl? She nods in the frame
of the rearview. The Little Blue Bitch
sputters back to a life I haven’t seen
her have in a long while. See, we all
needed this.

To the Sagacious Sage Grouse*


One-day old
                        age toddling.
    Mother grouse, keeping them under
         protection of the
                      sage-
                                  brush.
                     But to stray is essential.
                                 Must prove such a long
                                                                                   survival:
                                                          internal warming
                                           machinery. They sleep
under her wings at night. They hatch.
                                                                     They run and hide.
            Mother creates a
                                    diversion: the old phony broken-
                                                                                     wing routine, flopping. Almost
                      caught. The chicks whistle plaintively.
                                       The cocks stay far from her. Mother.
                           And then one is granted entry, clad in full nuptial plumage, gulping
               air. Inflating orange balloons of bare skin.
                                       A tasteful splash of color. Building-brooding for his
                         pompous cakewalk. He takes a few steps forward. Orange
  inflated and bouncing, a drumming for 3 miles. In January
                                      the cocks practice privacy. It will
                                                                            soon be curtain time again.


* *a cento from Desert Magazine, 1970

Lucid


Again I arrange the desert rocks I found
on the windowsill over the kitchen sink.

They like to move.
The little personalities they got.

And the wind is speaking again.
Odd for the morning. Anhedonia’s

cigar sizzles as she lights it. She’s reading
a newspaper from years ago.

That other life in that other place.
The perfume of the newsprint and

my brunette protector’s smoke rings
send dark messages. The air catches

me and those messages, carefully
constructed for years, and I imagine

the velvety coat of our horse, her
auburn I try to match, resting my head

on her, comparing. I wish I was velvet
with the soul of the world in my hair.

Her eyes never judge me, but they see me.
You see me good, girl. And all of it.

This does not scare me. I wash
my hair in the sink and see some red melt

into the white porcelain. The sink is a heavy
moment every time. I can’t shake that either.

Red rides the drain down into somewhere,
and I wonder if those little ones who burrow

will glow in the sun today.
                                                 If they wake.

Chiffon Arrangement
          for Faith Bacon, a burlesque performer who lost her fame and leapt to her death
                from her apartment window in 1956 in Chicago.


Sitting on a glass drum in Chicago,
you are a nude perforation
heading for tears:
through your thighs, your head,
pain beading your brain
like a headdress
after the moment of the crash.
Falling through the glass drum,
you see blood and hear
your hearty lungs lunge.
Nothing will be the same.
I will need a nurse.
I will lose my status:
“Lady with the Fans.”
Feathered movements
made you “America’s
Most Beautiful Dancer.”
now you are limping in pain:
What will I be? The pills
don’t work for any of your pain:
the cuts, the mind, the loss.
The newspapers spoke of you,
breaking you further:
your moth eaten fan, your dance
that lost its punch long ago.
You try to fly, but not high enough,
a peacock flying like a spiked
rainbow. Your roommate stands
holding your chiffon.
You finally tore free.

Screwing With Cowboys


With you here, it’s hard to care
much about burned-out lightbulbs
and early mornings.
I am so happy with you,
Anhedonia, but that man
still rolls around my head.
His hands are kind
and as white as chicken fat.
His swaggering thoughts
and his eyes are strong
like masturbatory moonshine.
I hold you from behind
while you take me away
on the back of a red-headed horse.
You tell me you found a place that will cure me,
where mud is a Xanexed wonder
and kindness fills the veins of everything.
You help me down into the mud
and I pulse there and fall back
into my limping mind.
October is over, finally,
but it peels into November
with more shit luck.
So I live through you, Anhedonia:
I rotate through the tissues around your bones
and skirt the walls of your veins.
I learn there what a real woman is
and this realness is why men hate us so.
Outside a desert saloon,
I watch the fringe hanging from your jacket.
You are my sassy cowgirl,
moving like the tailfeathers of an angelfish
as you spit and dig your heels into the sand.
Lethal and packing, we stand outside the swinging doors and laugh about the cliché.
Many men are behind these doors.
We will enter and they will insist
they can save everything.
All of it. Especially us.
We will keep our life and keep them away,
resuming our kinky adventures
as the poor girls on the block
with closed drapes and unmade beds.

--
Carrie McGath’s first collection of poems, Small Murders, was released in 2006 by New Issues Poetry and Prose. Since then, Carrie has self-published five limited-edition poetry chapbooks, including: Ward Eighty-One, The Chase, So Sorry to See You Go, Ohio Lonely, and Dollface. She is currently at work on her second full-length collection of poems, The Luck of Anhedonia. Her poems have appeared in literary journals including The Chariton Review, Hiram Poetry Review, and Barrow Street. Her poem, “Dear Anhedonia” won the AWP Intro Journals Project Award in 2019 and was published in The Tahoma Literary Review. Carrie is listed on VIDA’s ‘anti-list’ of Under-Acknowledged Women Writers where author, Monica Drake writes: “... McGath reimagines a world that opens to grand possibility while simultaneously remaining painfully claustrophobic, and therefore married to a new kind of truth.” In addition to being a poet, Carrie has worked as an art critic in Chicago since 2009 and has contributed to Chicago Art Magazine, Chicagoist, Third Coast Review, and Brut Force as a Midwest contributor covering Outsider Art. Carrie is a Doctoral Candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she teaches writing.