Collection of Poetry by Jill Mcdonough

Collection of Poetry by Jill McDonough Professor of English, Director of the MFA in Creative Writing

Accident, Mass Ave.

I stopped at a red light on Mass. Ave. in Boston, a couple blocks away from the bridge, and a woman in a beat-up old Buick backed into me. Like, cranked her wheel, rammed right into my side. I drove a Chevy pickup truck. It being Boston, I got out of the car yelling, swearing at this woman, a little woman, whose first language was not English. But she lived and drove in Boston, too, so she knew, we both knew, that the thing to do is get out of the car, slam the door as hard as you fucking can and yell things like What the fuck were you thinking? You fucking blind? What the fuck is going on? Jesus Christ! So we swore at each other with perfect posture, unnaturally angled chins. I threw my arms around, sudden jerking motions with my whole arms, the backs of my hands toward where she had hit my truck.

But she hadn't hit my truck. She hit the tire; no damage done. Her car was fine, too. We saw this while we were yelling, and then we were stuck. The next line in our little drama should have been Look at this fucking dent! I'm not paying for this shit. I'm calling the cops, lady. Maybe we'd throw in a You're in big trouble, sister, or I just hope for your sake there's nothing wrong with my fucking suspension, that sort of thing. But there was no fucking dent. There was nothing else for us to do. So I stopped yelling, and she looked at the tire she'd backed into, her little eyebrows pursed and worried. She was clearly in the wrong, I was enormous, and I'd been acting as if I'd like to hit her. So I said Well, there's nothing wrong with my car, nothing wrong with your car...are you OK? She nodded, and started to cry, so I put my arms around her and I held her, middle of the street, Mass. Ave., Boston, a couple blocks from the bridge.

1 I hugged her, and I said We were scared, weren't we? and she nodded and we laughed.

Casual Sleep

I dream we’re all so tired all the time we start watching strangers sleep. Videos of people asleep all snuggled up in flannel, under down.

Sleep-tastic grow the YouTube channels. Mattress stores tuck sleepers in their tidy cotton beds. A cottage industry yawns open: major in Sleep, become a Sleep Coach.

Commodity, new field: I was in finance but now I’m in sleep. Sleepers in shop windows wrapped in fleece, conked out on couches. Subway riders scroll through sleepers on their smartphones, brushing sleep from dreamers’ eyes with thumbs. On Craigslist, “Strictly Platonic,” one man’s an open minded expert, can sleep for days, his listing says. He can sleep through literally anything.

He lists his biceps’ circumference, the height his shoulder could heft or nestle your heavy head. The best sleep of your life, he promises, next to a photo of him in crisp, sky blue pajamas. Brushing his perfect teeth.

Do What You Love

Do what you love, they said. The money will follow, they said. They didn’t say what the money should follow, or who. Poor money, lost money: money must have been so much confuse! One money, twice, eleven monies, four: money trying to keep it together, ragged flock of non-native stragglers, lollygaggers, each losing their buddy, special follow-time friend. Money talks, but not like I do. Poor monies, mute 2 ESL-speaking lost souls. Do what you love and the money will follow. Until it gets distracted, follows somebody else! Until love doubles back, shrugs money off its trail. Money follows love like good money after bad. Bad money! Mad money, bad habits, dying hard. Do what you love, they said, but what if what you love is watching Die Hard for the dozenth time? When maybe you can’t sleep? Look at poor Bruce Willis’s poor bloody feet: pause it there, make popcorn with nutritional yeast, talk about how there must be some sneakers somewhere in that building. But no. Alas! There wasn’t any time. No time for shoes? Baby needs a new pair of shoes; mama don’t work for free, Sandra says. Time is money, they said, and you are profligate, spendthrift, a lazy-ass wastrel, leaning in doorways, on bars, leaning back on Wright’s hammock, again and again. Again. Lolling, lollygagging, shrugging when they I know you must be very busy, grinning when they sigh how busy they are. Busy! Not so much! Because you do you, baby; keep doing what you love: nothing. Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is oh, nothing. Nothing much.

I Dream We Try

I dream we try gun manufacturers as terrorists and win. The Gun Industry’s a team of sneering white guys. Suits, saying all the wrong stuff. Am I a lawyer? Witness? I am Julia Roberts in Pelican Brief and Erin Brockovich. I say crossfire more than terrorism, and schoolkids, every day. Their lawyer’s smarmy, dismissive, saying Sandy Hook and of course those beautiful children and I say No, the other ones. The ones you make us take for granted, the ones that you can’t see. Black kids shot dead daily, whole zones we’ve given up. He smirks. What about cars, cars kill people. Says bears, terrorists, sharks. But in the dream I’d said enough. Whatever I said worked. Everyone laughed at the gun guys, gun guys crying shark. We won, won instant reparations. Our dead spun back to before. Not like zombies, not like the monkey’s paw. Just back, all better, all gun deaths now undone. Dried blood gone bright, pulling back into her pink slacks, his black 3 hoodie’s holes, now healed. At first we’re scared; it’s not just kids, it’s everyone. Good guys and bad, soldiers from forever now come home. We get them all back. To help with what’s next. And we know who the terrorists are.

"That's why we don't keep things in stairwells." --Mary Warnement, The Boston Athenaeum

When the former curator remembers the Ming, remembers knocking it over, he remarks, "the thing took fucking forever for fall." Shaking his heavy head. Inside, the Ming's still taking its time. Still falling. Look: he opened the magic door, invented a way of making more time. All of us always longing for longer, a few extra hot days in July, sunshine, more time with the kids. Not this endless loop, cringing eternity, fucking forever in the poor guy's vase-sized head. Scott asks if I'd be twenty again. Not for all the money in the world. But then I sort of take it back, bargain: would I for sure meet Josey? Could I bank the money I did not give back to the world—just Jeter's share, net worth of the board of Goldman Sachs—relive those years and then have the rest of my life with her, her and fewer jobs? A car, dishwasher, dryer. New roof, newer shoes, Josey's never-swollen one-shift-a-week knees. Go back to twenty, to the instant the Ming first leans into thinner air. This vase makes it through Breughal, the new world, microscopes. From bustles to Google to finally fall. But not finally anything: always it slips from a half-hearted shelf, fresh from its crated straw, his fingertips

4 always in reach. You gain a week, say, week of replay, your fault in the space time continuum, week of stutter and halt taken back in slivers of seconds, in panicked gasps, sleep rent again. You gain a week. This is how it's spent.

Bill Corbett’s One Fund Boston Box

Shore Leave, South Boston

When Josey waits on the Portuguese Tall Ship seamen and the local girls they just picked up, they order

Long Island Iced Teas. Josey loves them anyway, their adorable accents, dress whites, quick success with the ladies.

So she takes out the four white spirits, talks about how each can shine: Vodka with caviar and blini; gin with its cardomom, black pepper spice; tequila, straight with sangrita, Hemingway daiquiri rum. But together, she tells them, blunted with triple sec, Coke, what’s the fucking point. They love her, take her up on Hearsts and Aqueducts, give her an enameled Tall Ship pin.

They want to take the girls back, lucky girls, cook for them in the galley. What is this thing, one asks Josey, this small thing it comes with martinis. When she tells him he cries out Olives! I will cook for you cod with olives. One girl makes a face, says it’s too late to eat but the other kicks her under the bartop, says I’m starving. I think that sounds great.

So Pretty

So pretty we say to strangers sharing a cab over a causeway, or next to us, en route to JFK. Shaking our heads together over our oval of sunset, 5 our lightning lighting up our clouds. 6A's reading up on what happens after death, the spirit world powers she'll get when she's divine. Strangers are crazy. But we can still agree: so pretty, the child's hair in the Stop & Shop line, somebody's laughing baby on the T. Her little body! Your neighbor's fresh clapboards, freshly caulked seams. Fragrant lure of stripes of fresh-mown grass. So pretty: so empty, so touching, how we fall so short so close.

Still Falling

My friend’s trying to stop smoking, and I say Oh cut yourself some slack, sick of pretending we’re not going to die. We are going to die still falling for crap about berries, a glass of red wine. It could be worse. We’re not suicidal, smack fiends, Swazi. So we’re still skipping the gym, still eating fries, still falling to sleep with the TV on. Whatever. We’re daily closer to dying, but it appears to happen slow. Nightfall, dusty snow, cold night still falling, he laughs, long rope of smoke, warm breath rising. Right. We each hang ourselves, but it’s a long rope, Jill. See? We’re all still fine, still falling.

The 30

Jogging toward the bus on Columbus I see it’s already crowded, squeeze my way to the back. I think it’ll get worse in Chinatown, but I’m wrong. This early the produce shoppers still crowd the sidewalks, admire bouquets of hanging lacquered ducks. Shipping containers full of persimmon-colored persimmons, a red-gloved woman picking over the lot. Guavas, broccoli, collards, grapes of every description. November, persimmons thirty-nine cents a pound. One woman nestles in with me and four others in the way back. Comfortable, we’re sleepy as puppies, not worried: nobody smells. She turns her iPod up, plays “Tell Me Something Good” loud enough for us all to hear as we pass Jade Galore, Fat Tang Hotel, persimmon piles big as Volkswagen bugs. After “Tell Me Something Good,” it’s The Cure, “Without You,” and we are happy, snug in our collective nostalgia, passing the Modesto Food 6 Distributors truck: its slogan, Poultry in Motion. Yellow transfers safe in our pockets. Good for all trips till ten.

The Money after Julie Mehretu's “Mural”

I went to visit the money. Which is a mural at Goldman Sachs which don’t even get me started. They don’t let you any closer than the sidelines, security desk on the right. No way past the uniformed men, electronic gates, but, ma’am, you can exit the building, look in through rain-spotted plate glass. I got ma’am-ed, smiled, stood in the rain outside the money. Here’s who I saw go in, who I saw belongs there, who it has to be said never even glanced at the money: short white men in natty suits—is it rude to note they’re short? If I admit the suits are natty? A beautiful woman in red-soled shoes. The red soled shoes brown suede. Red soles mean, yes, they are money. Another woman with her laptop in a cush grey flannel felt case. Money. Classy, classy money. These people know how to shop. These people are nice and dry. I’m wet, in a wet blue rain coat, fogging up a nose-height spot on the window. Hands, forehead pressed like a child’s to the shark tank, looking in at the beautiful money. It looks like this: confusion of streamlined detail, all the colors. Calders in a blender. Flight paths, grids over maps over wires. Plus an orange square I really like. More than you can see at one time with just your eyes. You have to pace back and forth in the rain, get glimpses of money, between columns, through rain-spotted glass.

7 You just try to hand them some hot chocolate, said EMTs at the scene. Of the unscathed milling in shock, after someone opened fire.

Women’s Prison Every Week Lockers, metal detectors, steel doors, C.O. to C.O., different forms, desks—mouth open, turn—so slow I use the time to practice patience, grace, tenderness for glassed-in guards. The rules recited as if they were the same rules every week: I can wear earrings. I cannot wear earrings. I can wear my hair up. I cannot wear my hair up. I dressed by rote: cords in blue or brown, grey turtleneck, black clogs. The prisoners, all in grey sweatshirts, blue jeans, joked I looked like them, fit in. I didn’t think about it, until I dreamed of being shuffled in, locked up in there, hustled through the heavy doors. In the dream the guards just shook their heads, smirked when I spelled my name, shook the freezing bars. Instead of nightly escorts out, I’d stay in there forever. Who would know? So I went to Goodwill, spent ten bucks on pink angora, walked back down those halls a movie star. When I stood at the front of the class there rose a sharp collective sigh. The one who said she never heard of pandering until the arraignment said OK, I’m going to tell her. Then she told me: freedom is wasted on women like me. They hate the dark cotton, jeans they have to wear, each one a shadow of the other their whole sentence. You could wear red! she accused. Their favorite dresses, silk slips, wool socks all long gone, bagged up for sisters, moms—maybe Goodwill, maybe I flicked past them looking for this cotton candy pink angora cardigan, pearl buttons. They can’t stop staring, so I take it off and pass it around, let each woman hold it in her arms, appraise the wool between her fingers, a familiar gesture, second nature, from another world.