Two Poems by Macaulay Glynn
This is a selection from our Fall/Winter 2020 issue. Macaulay Glynn was one of the Breakout 8 winners. Please click here to purchase a print or digital version of the full issue featuring prose, poetry, and art from over 20 artists.
I HAVE BEEN EXPOSED TO A TOXIC MINERAL COMPOUND
that makes me believe hunger
is a disease I give myself. It also makes me lucky.
Lucky hours hunched and lock-jawed,
dizzy as a penny spins
down a well where quiet wishes can turn
geyser water sick with copper. It's true, just
look at Wyoming's geothermal pools all
stuffed up with pennies like the slit of a jingling
piggy bank, reduced
to a simmer and patinated
green. Wishing is a kind of hunger
but not in the way that hunger
is a kind of wish. My brother tells me
the human body can imagine the sensation of cold
but not the sensation of heat. When hungry,
I am cold as ore. All ore deposits
are mineral deposits, yet the reverse is false.
This is because only one of those terms
denotes value, which is a lucky feature
for anything to have. Pennies
are elemental, symbolic:
worth more for their weight
in metal than as currency.
A valueless head on a sidewalk
portends good fortune for those who
look down often. As for utility,
I have little. A hard edge:
Better to scratch off
a lottery ticket. Best to do it right
here at the register. I pick
the one with three golden chests
a two-dollar shipwreck ripped from a reel.
I'm lucky, though I find no dollar-sign
jackpot, I match a few symbols
for what I'm sure are human
bones. In a gas station, people buy
almonds and energy drinks. A line forms
behind a neat row of bones like a ladder
worth walking under.
ODE TO KUBRICK’S “OLD WOMAN IN BATH”
You bathe alone in a masterpiece
of intention. You are the vanishing
point of Jack’s desire. You unfold
a heartbeat crescendo, a slender
eighth note, and glide the path
of gaze like an inarticulate moon
beyond a wheat field of ascending
crows. Who beckons whom? A
creeping auteur watches behind
the curtain of a mechanical eye.*
Jack wants what he wants—his
son dislocated. His questionless
bride. A manuscript in awe of
you, the sum of misdeeds that
build the room we inherit, pause
before, step inside the garland
of your mossy arms. Voiceless
but for when you appear
mirrored, a bloated hag
haw-hawing like a woman
could, I suppose, if he imagined
so. I imagine a velvet slug
slipping along the roof
of your toothless mouth, a
clump of Shelley Duvall’s hair
clogging the drain. We watch you
being watched. We see
your life is relevant as desire
to a horse in the head
light of an oncoming train.
* “I’m an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it.” [From a 1923 interview with Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, quoted in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972).]
Macaulay Glynn teaches creative writing at Binghamton University, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in English Rhetoric & Creative Writing. She is a recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the Marion Clayton Link Endowment, and has formerly served as director of the Binghamton Poetry Project, a free community workshop program through the Binghamton Center for Writers. She is an assistant editor and reading series curator for New York Quarterly and poetry co-editor of Harpur Palate.
