Three Poems
by Joshua Mckinney
Credential
American Idiom
​When I was a boy and playground squabbles grew
too heated, our last resort was to evoke
the power of our fathers and to boast,
“My dad can whip your dad.” If it wasn’t true,
it hardly mattered because somehow, we knew,
or couldn’t know, that men would never come to blows
over what we said behind the jungle gym. We spoke
freely, not knowing that our tongues could do
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​far more than fists. There was a brutal fluency
that we absorbed at home, immersed in words
condensed to violent metaphors; they colored
speech with the hue of our community.
In time we’d learn to wield a lexicon of slurs,
and thus, to love our kind, united in identity.
Unto This Day
After the thundersnow, when the cell-latch
lifted, I kissed the ones I loved and fled
into the crystal hills, where blue on white
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and white on blue, my liquid eyes breathed
arias of ice. I left a shallow track, and when
new snow began to fall, I looked back
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and saw each footprint was a prayer
that only memory’s tracing could keep clear.
Love’s frigid vigil held me there
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until all rote relinquishments were healed.
Lost and full of promise, I could not move
to mar my hope in what I had not seen.
Thence when I woke to waking, I was home,
hopeful and devoured. And no one knew me there.
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BIO
Joshua McKinney’s most recent book of poetry is Small Sillion (Parlor Press, 2019). His work has appeared in such journals as Boulevard, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, New American Writing, and many others. He is the recipient of The Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize, The Dickinson Prize, The Pavement Saw Chapbook Prize, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. He is co-editor of the online ecopoetics zine, Clade Song.
I was born in Iowa, which is to say that I, too, attended
the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I spent my formative years
sitting cross-legged and hunched amid straight rows of corn
that stretched to the level edge of the horizon.
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I was schooled in the stoic doctrine of a scarecrow
wearing my dead grandfather’s overalls, my dead aunt’s straw hat.
I grew silent reciting my primer to a one-eyed crow:
A is for Alfalfa; B is for Blizzard; C is for Corn.
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Unshod and shirtless, I was lashed by the summer sun’s ferule
until sheets of skin hung from my back like wallpaper
in a dead farmhouse. These my mother peeled away
and pressed in a Bible, and on these I composed my first poem,
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an ode to how no one wept when my father left
his tractor ticking in the field and walked off over the broken earth
into the arms of a waitress waiting with her herbs and erasures.
No one took offense at the insinuation of wild rose
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mounting the trellis by the well, or when the evening breeze
brought rumor of swine from the neighboring farm.
Although she strove to conceal it, I knew my mother
was a muskrat, for I had spied her rise sleek-furred and dripping
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​from the creek, crunching a crayfish in her teeth.
Oh, halcyon days of metamorphosis and theft! At times,
there were raccoons in the corn crib, hornets in the outhouse,
foxes in the henhouse. There were, at times, possums
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in the corn crib, skunks in the hothouse, raccoons in the outhouse,
foxes in the henhouse. Other times, there were mice
in the corn crib, hornets in the hothouse, foxes, raccoons,
and skunks in the henhouse. Once, I even caught my granny
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sucking eggs in the henhouse, but that became our bond
and no one was harmed. Come winter, the cold smacked me
around until my nose dripped to my lips and froze.
The sleeves of my jacket were snail-tracked with snot.
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My cheeks chapped as I tracked myself down the ice-
packed storm-cellar path for a jar of sunlight and syrup.
I gobbled apricot cobbler and green beans and dreamed of
a time when the glass world would shatter and I could
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launch a fleet of paper boats in the horse trough.
When spring set the trees and eaves to weeping, I made
mud pies and fed my slipper to a sow. And when at last
the grass erased it all with green, I escaped my personality,
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and my degree was conferred. All this was a long time ago,
I remember, as I stand on the beach and gaze across
a wind-harrowed sea to the convex western edge of the horizon.
But set down this, set down this: my tutelage cost nothing
save the smell of silage, the sight of my granny
come lumbering from the barn, a pail of moonlight
in each hand. My only assignment was to rise as nobody
from my cot on the screen-porch where I tossed
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in the fever of night’s damp dog-mouth, to rise and run
barefoot under a sky so sprent with stars they sank to earth,
where I plucked them from their erratic orbits and held them
in loose devotion, pulsing and luminescent, their greeny light
leaking through the fingers of my sticky, anonymous fists.
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