Lynn McGee
Crush, 12
I’m driving up the West Side Highway and singing,
lungs happy as a sponge finally introduced to water.
I’m sisters with the Hudson River, onyx scratched
with light thrown by high rises on the other side.
I have a new lover and we share a fear of the ocean.
Her favorite place to shop is Lowe’s. She has
a big truck and the strategic intelligence of a wolf.
I throw myself at her like icy drops from air conditioners
embedded in windows high above Park Avenue.
She has never seen tulips growing in the ground.
It’s April in New York, garden boxes ablaze.
I send photos from my phone.
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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