Lynn McGee
Crush, 7
You are polite as a cadet. I hear your boots
on concrete in the garage — you talk hands-free,
arriving home, and three times zones over,
I unlock my door, revved up as a migrating
bird, wings limp at my sides. I drop my coat,
scarf, bag, and everything I am known for —
my efficiency, my lucidity — slides off like mud
on sandals left out in rain and emerging
clean, when the storm has passed.
Crush, 8
It’s not as simple as the contrast of you street boxing
a neighborhood guy when you were ten — falling
to the sidewalk and jumping back up — while
my sister and I, in a suburb of red brick houses,
perfected our walk with a book on our heads.
It’s not as simple as a Venn diagram revealing
that sliver where we overlap — and yet
that narrow margin glints like a waning moon,
and I am standing outside on a dark night
flinging pheromones, looking up.
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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