Marc McKee

Suspense Account

I am not jealous of the berries in Sweden
until Miho says with searing sweetness at Alissa’s party
I was jealous of the berries in Sweden,

distraction from rapture by different rapture
but to tell of all the raptures
would let escape the remainder of our minutes

which is why we glue mirrors
everywhere. I’m searching for an entourage
to be a part of, a vehicle impervious

yet open to the oceanic flukes of contact.
The berries wait. Every second makes them
more of what they are. Numerous personnel

have invaded me. Numerous personnel
have I invited and many watches
have I lost. Aggression returns, over and over,

sprinting through each season,
leaving on the ledger imprints of steel boots
incapable of the reflection that makes of breathing

such a lavish riddle. Nothing to be done
but make and be stuff for it to come wreck
each time. The berries in Sweden

don’t even take photographs. Look at the fracture
that passes for a smile on our face,
as if we’d just discovered that the pain

is a gathered wrath of effervescent roses,
each petal a name that sings a pang
into our frail and brilliant carriage.

We careen want-spun down the avenues
of our own specific and lush time. How
brave. Not for an extra second would we take back

anything we have given,
though we are thirsty,
though we are threatened stockings

bulging with chrysalises
​and the clouds’ mouths won’t tell us anything.

---

Stellar Furnace

The labels and label makers come later,
the lofty prerogatives, the philosopher
despising indulgences of the body and thus

unequal to an ordinary refrigerator, sheets
with high thread counts. What comes first
is the size of a fist and 30 seconds later

it’s out of the reach of any other fist ever.
Archers, gentles, others: supreme architectures
demand superior catastrophes.

Guilty of desolations birds flew above,
the first robot demanded a robot queen
and a story about how his side hurt

and even now it is unclear how
this story grew into every other one,
but birds flew above, and later paint

to the rescue, and quills. The lute
was invented. Sometimes a number
of people must die for those remaining

to agree upon the meaning
of reaching consensus. The story
is a story of poison, of love, of knavery

and battering rams and delicate
baked goods. So much to complain about,
so much to perish by while enamored of.

The story is of pangs with no cause
and no remedy. Meadow into pothole,
cauldrons of committees. Reparations?

Reparations can never be made.
And we will never give full account
​of our peculiar and tenacious joy.
​

---

We Blow the Pants Off Our Competition

                                          
You know our stylo
by what can’t be erased from the sky.

Your pants in our hands
become traveling flags

natives across the globe
lift their rare elixirs to.

The mountain wouldn’t
without the say-so

of our committee,
and our committee

is made of irrevocable ascending.
We play percussion with bank

accounts, war is like breakfast
and we wipe our lips

with doves that never
stop flying. We can’t be

ruffled. Of course
you admire our sunglasses:

they will never break.
We contain platitudes

that shiver the timbres
of your disinterested

philosophies. Our desert
makes an outhouse

of celestial utopias.
Parapsychology is like

finger counting to five
for our most simple lamps.

We never ever sleep.
​Please call us.
​

---

Dromania Means Wanderlust 

Look at how amazing everything is
but then stop looking at how amazing
everything is because it dulls

and then one moves as though through dishwater
toward never collapsing ashore.
The rhetor perishes at the zenith

of arresting intersections
being overcome by the sparkle
and gait of everything

in its amazing state of being everything
not still and thus amazing-looking
until it just kills you to wake.

From the ceiling I can see me
like a roving hungry something
dreaming a ravenous campaign

to silence the unquenchable amazing
that stretches from here to there
and back. I must go there and back,

must everything muzzle. I will lace my spine
with everything’s excessive amazing
so we will never so keenly hurt

again. Nothing will ever ripple
so relentlessly or be so still
as the late, small bird

in a corner of white brick
in the middle of a morning
when the monsoon has stopped. 


 


--
Marc McKee received his MFA from the University of Houston and his PhD from the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he lives with his wife, Camellia Cosgray. Recent work appears in Sixth Finch, Sou’wester, Pebble Lake Review, The Journal, and Artifice. He is the author of a chapbook, What Apocalypse? (New Michigan Press, 2008) and two full-length collections, Fuse (Black Lawrence Press, 2011) and Bewilderness (forthcoming, Black Lawrence Press, 2014).