Lynn McGee
Crush, 1
I think I would like you sleepy, staggering
into the kitchen, putting the Keurig pod into
the press and pulling down the handle to puncture
its plastic top. I am agitated because of you, fitful
in the workplace, careful to hydrate, both topically
and with bottles of water I toss easily into
the wastebasket a few feet away. There are
a dozen states between us. I play it cool
as the willowy end of a branch lightly scratching
the roof of your car. I sit up in bed cycling through
your photos. My windows are open and a jet
churns through the black sky, cars loud
as ball bearings on the parkway. I contain
myself. I wake in the night and check my phone
for evidence you have passed through. Your
indifference is powerful, like weather. I can’t get
out of its path. I doubt my sensory data. I swerve
around trees. I walk back up the hill.
Lynn McGee is the author of Tracks (Broadstone Books, 2019) and Sober Cooking (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016), as well as two award-winning poetry chapbooks, Heirloom Bulldog (Bright Hill Press, 2015) and Bonanza (Slapering Hol Press, 1996). Here poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, Ontario Review, Phoebe, Painted Bride Quarterly, Sun Magazine, and The New Guard, among other journals, as well as in the anthology Stonewall’s Legacy (Local Gems Press, 2019), edited by With José Pelauz, McGee wrote the children’s book Starting Over in Sunset Park (Tilbury House Publishers, 2020). She serves on the advisory board of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and co-curates the Lunar Walk Poetry Series with Gerry LaFemina and Madeleine Barnes. Online at lynnmcgee.com.
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