Gary McDowell

Tell Me Again About The Last Time You Saw Her

The telephone on the moon has been ringing
continuously

since 1969          The footprints
ache to answer it
See red Mars
rise

Driving becomes difficult with only the road
in your way          What shatters
on it but light, two moons claiming the other false
The best kind of torture
The voluntary kind
Ghosts revered for their sense of smell:
fingerling potatoes roasted in olive oil
and sea salt

And on the couch          Paranoia
curled-up in the shape
of a child’s skeleton
​

---

I’ve Lost a Considerable Amount of Weight

I want women without a God

If you’ve suffered death, heart attack, or stroke,
call now

God damn it, it’s cold, says Chicago,
which is an almost better place for warmth to be
Somewhere in Somewhere, TX
an armadillo crosses the road
and three goldfish share a ten-gallon hat

Would a bulimic fatalist
trust fate

Would a diabetic baseball purist ever suicide
squeeze the clean-up hitter
Show me yours, and I’ll show you mind
I’m everything you meant to say and didn’t
Tell me how
​

---

More and More Like the Wife

We hope the possession never ends:
the molecular eye, the ocean’s narration,

things I cannot see to see

Child,
there is no easy way to drown
I once ran a marathon barefoot,
and the door to the desert locks
behind you when you go
So go
Legendary jazz: chaos in a cracked
coffee cup          The horizon

dips to the lips of a giant fish,
a catfish so large
Even fate gets hammered
hard by the hard rain  


 


--
Gary McDowell’s first collection of poems, American Amen (Dream Horse Press, 2010), won the 2009 Orphic Prize for Poetry. He’s also the author of two chapbooks, They Speak of Fruit (Cooper Dillon, 2009) and The Blueprint (Pudding House, 2005), and he’s the co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice (Rose Metal Press, 2010). His poems have appeared in various literary journals, including The Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, The Indiana Review, The Laurel Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, and Quarterly West. He lives in Nashville, TN with his wife and two kids where he is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Belmont University.